Fear, Loathing, and Pandemics

An epidemic turns out to be a rotten time to have a germophobe President. Trump's more obvious pathologies -- ignorance, narcissism, magical thinking, pathological lying -- have gotten the obvious attention, because those are all real dangers to public safety. But Trump's germophobia makes him fundamentally unsuited to a public health crisis. His focus on making sure that he, personally, does not get ill, is just the mindset that increases the number of people who will. Selfishness helps an epidemic thrive. The outbreak can only be defeated by cooperation. It attacks the whole society, and the society needs to fight back together.

How do I not get it? is the wrong question to ask in plague time, although of course everyone would like not to get it. How do I not spread it? is the more important question.

If your goal is to be one of the lucky ones, to be spared while others fall ill, that will be counterproductive, because other people getting it raises your risk. The fewer people get it, the less likely you are to be one of them. (This logic can be particularly difficult for elites or the super-rich to grasp, since they're used to being spared from widespread problems.) If your whole strategy is just to protect yourself, that will likely fail. Viruses gonna virus. If your strategy is to help your whole community control it, your individual odds will probably go up.

I've found myself, for the last week or two, treating myself as presumptively infected. There's no sign I have covid-19 or anything like it, but I live with someone I don't want to get sick. So I'm acting as if I have something and trying not to expose my wife to any germs I might have. Likewise, I'm trying not to do anything in the classroom that might expose my students. I wash my hands a lot these days.

I'm middle aged, but not elderly, and there are no known covid-19 cases in my area yet. My odds if I come down with covid-19 aren't as good as they would be if  were 10 years younger, but they're not bad. Should I come down with a case, I will probably ride it out fine. But I don't want to spread the damn thing.

Pretty soon, this very infectious little bug is going to get close to Trump. I don't expect him to respond well.

Talk Like Crazy People Are Listening

Dear politicians: talk like crazy people are listening to you. Because they are. We're a big country, with hundreds of millions of people and no guaranteed health care. That means there are a lot of Americans who are mentally ill, and a lot of those people can't get proper treatment. Every time you speak in public, remember that there are some disturbed people who will take what you say, whatever you say, seriously, and that they might act on it.

We've been having a lot of public debates about "responsibility," 'unity," "civility," and other complicated, nuanced words that are easy to twist around to mean different things. So I'm going to keep it simple. Every public figure speaking in public has got to remember that some crazy people are listening. Don't say anything that those people will understand as a call to violence.

But won't mentally ill people misunderstand things, and hear calls to violence that weren't intended that way? Yes. Exactly. They may well hear you calling for blood when you thought you were carefully staying on the right side of the line. That's why you should get nowhere near the line, at all, ever.

This rule is not hard. Don't act like it's not simple.

There are troubled people watching TV and listening to the radio and reading the internet all day, and they have trouble sorting out what's real. Don't scare those people into using bombs or guns.

But what if the talk-like-crazy-people-are-listening rule cramps my style? What if it takes away my big rally lines that excite the crowd, or the new spike in my ratings? What then?

Then you're risking people's lives for personal gain. What good do you think is going to come of that?

cross-posted from Dagblog; all comments welcome there, rather than here

The New York Times Wants You to Know How Normal Everyone Is Here at the Applebee's

Here in bucolic Fairfield, California, amidst rolling vineyards and struggling big-box stores, unassuming souls like Norman Bates go largely unremarked. While most Americans would instinctively recoil from his habit of brutal murder and the uses to which he puts his victims’ bodies, here in Middle America he is Norman Next Door, a soft-spoken young man whose manners nearly any mother would applaud, working to keep open a family motel that serves both as symptom and as symbol of the economic anxieties roiling the heartland. Norman has heard murmurs advocating radical change, from Wal-Mart’s gun aisle to the local church’s pork-and-beans supper, and seems guardedly optimistic. Perhaps it will become easier for him to date. “Most girls don’t want to hear about being violently stabbed to death and having selected portions of their remains repurposed,” he says, browsing the knives at the dollar store. Now, he feels, things may be about to go his way.

    The Joker understands that mainstream Americans do not approve of him, or his plans to set most of Gotham City’s inhabitants on fire. He has come to see this disapproval as the fruit of consistent media bias. A slender man dressed with immaculate care, he possesses an infectious laugh that instantly announces his presence in any room. “Your big legacy media companies just aren’t equipped to think about crime on my scale,” he says, sweeping with his customary brio into a local Steak n’ Shake and nonchalantly commandeering a booth whose most recent occupants have succumbed to his poisonous gas. “They’re dinosaurs. They can only imagine mass extinction as a bad thing.”  He takes a sip from the Orange Freeze a newly departed customer has left untouched and gives his trademark roguish grin. “I think ordinary people, your average Americans, are tired of all the knee-jerk moralizing, the hypocrisy. The New York Times got so holier-than-thou about that thing with the orphanages, but they publish David Brooks twice a week. How do they justify that?” He feels the current political volatility, the disappearance of the Police Commissioner and Mayor, might at last permit his ideas to be heard. “The anarchy, the looting, the complete breakdown of civil order: it’s my moment.” He strolls along Maple Street, glittering with fireflies in the Midwestern dusk, toward the Volunteer Fire Department, another clever scheme in mind.
               
    Leatherface has no grand ambitions for himself. It has always been enough for him to live here, on the wind-scoured Texas plains, working with his brothers in the family’s humble assortment of businesses: a small gas station, adjoining restaurant, and a now-shuttered slaughterhouse. Often one of the brothers must resort to hitchhiking, hoping to steer passing motorists the family’s way. Leatherface does the homestead’s chores, his beloved chainsaw always at the ready. He even built the family’s furniture, using whatever traditional materials come nearest to hand. Years of thrift have become ingrained habit, and absolutely nothing goes to waste.
    "We’re just trying to put meat on the table,” he explains, slipping into an Applebee’s booth that other regulars, by unspoken agreement, leave reserved for him. He has brought his own dinner, wrapped in humble butcher’s paper, and tucks into his meal with a workingman’s eager gusto. He must occasionally readjust his homemade, lovingly hand-crafted mask, constructed entirely from recycled human flesh. “That’s what people outside the flyover states never understand. If they want to find out what this country is really about, tell them to come out here. Straight to my house.”

    Darth Vader, weary at the end of another long day, agrees to an interview at a Cracker Barrel off the Ohio Turnpike. He orders coffee for what can only be reasons of politeness; his complicated and burdensome respirator apparatus will not allow him to drink liquid in public.  His detractors in the press view him as aloof, out of touch, and motivated by implacable evil, but he still sees himself as a humble farm boy from a tiny desert village he declines to name, a place so poor that his family actually had to farm for water. He never knew his father, but he claims still to feel that Dickensian desert demi-orphan inside him at his most impetuous moments, as when he is strangling another senior staff officer, and during whatever subsequent moments of fleeting regret.       
    He was raised not to complain, but feels that the public has come to see him solely through the lens of a one unfortunate, notorious day. “The single worst news cycle of your life, repeated forever,” he intones, in his deep, reassuring church-organ basso. “That is CNN.” He offers no self-justification or excuse for the destruction of the planet Alderaan and its millions of human inhabitants. He speaks instead of his faith, at once old-fashioned and profound, a set of lifelong, deeply held beliefs that have come to feel out of place in modern, secular society.
    “Is the problem that I created a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced?” he asks. “Or is the problem that no one in the liberal coastal elite could feel that disturbance? I find their lack of faith disturbing.” He counts out his tip carefully, in exact change, before leaving it on our server’s lifeless body.

    The few New Yorkers who have ever heard of Cthulhu consider him a malevolent demon-god intent on the elimination of all human life. But here in the hardworking blue-collar neighborhoods of Providence, Rhode Island, he passes easily for that most beloved of homespun meals, a plate of fresh calamari. Cthulhu considers his poor reputation a temporary problem, soon to be rectified, in his view, by the terrified madness and utter annihilation of every living creature. It’s a goal he has long dreamed of; he knows that not everybody understands. We meet at a local Dunkin’ Donuts, where his entrance reduces customers and staff to shrieking horror and dismay.
    “This country has a serious problem,” he says in a blood-curdling and nigh-incomprehensible gargle. “Washington doesn’t understand it. Mainstream media doesn’t understand it. No mewling pathetic humanoid could possibly grasp it. I alone know what the problem is, because I am the problem. You will all bow down to me before you die.” He demonstrates his point by disemboweling the morning-rush customers and brutally eviscerating the staff. The interviewer, reduced to gibbering madness, crawls out of the Dunkin’ Donuts having lost of his ability to speak. He has been permanently institutionalized; portions of this article have been reconstructed from his notes. But before leaving, Cthulhu takes two honey-dipped donuts in a wax paper bag: for all the world, in that moment, just another ordinary customer on the streets of the Real America.

cross-posted from Dagblog: all comments welcome there, rather than here

Trump Does Not Care If People Get Hurt

President Trump's impromptu press conference today was a shocking display of his moral depravity and his allegiance to bigotry. There are so many things wrong with it, in so many stunning ways, that everyone is trying to digest it and focusing on different parts. But one particularly scary thing has not yet gotten much attention: Trump shows a nearly complete lack of interest in preventing more bloodshed like this. That is unprecedented, and extremely dangerous.

Every previous president of the United States has been deeply averse to civil violence and has always worked to prevent it. That's only natural. Civil violence and disorder are the opposite of government; our leaders' power is vested in exactly the order that civil violence disrupts. Our long national struggle over civil rights, which has often led to street unrest by various parties, has highlighted this. Every president, whatever their party loyalty or racial politics, has made keeping order and avoiding violence a paramount goal. Presidents who were sympathetic with angry segregationists, or who needed them for electoral reasons, still wanted to prevent any violence or lawbreaking by segregationist mobs. Even politicians who were themselves personally racist did not want racist violence in the streets, because preventing violence in the streets was always seen as crucial. In the same way, politicians who were for progress on civil rights were nonetheless very much against any violence by, say, the Black Panthers, or any riots in African-American neighborhoods. Preventing riots is central to the President's job, and to the President's authority.

In a real sense, you can say that JFK became a pro-civil rights president because it was eventually his only way to get peace in the streets. When he entered the White House, civil rights was not on his agenda. Whatever personal liberalism he had on civil rights issues was strictly abstract; he was not going to act on that. But then he had to deal with furious, angry segregationist mobs and with Southern politicians from his own party who refused to control those mobs. Some of his phone calls with Southern governors (which JFK taped) are desperate and frustrating. And the transcripts make it clear that, more than anything else, Kennedy does not want to see anyone hurt or killed. Eventually JFK moves to back the civil rights agenda strongly because it's the right thing to do but also because he can't get any cooperation from the other side, so he just has to beat them.

But today President Trump did none of the things American presidents do to calm things down and prevent violence. He excused provocative behavior, claiming that white supremacists were "quietly protesting" when they were actually shouting about hating Jews. Worse still, he made it clear that he favored one side, and justified their violence to the greatest degree he could. He even said that some of the white supremacists were "fine people" and not white supremacists at all. NONE of that is what you do when you want people to stop doing something. All of it was aimed at excusing what they had done and signaling them NOT to stop. Ask yourself white the alt-right knuckleheads think when they hear Trump talking like that. What they hear is, "Keep going, fellas, I'm on your side."

That is just crazy. It shows Trump's complete, depraved indifference to public safety. And it exposes his indifference, or actual hostility, to the rule of law which his office embodies. The President is meant to enforce public order, and that legal order is the foundation of the President's power. And so every previous president has put questions of order-vs.-disorder before pettier questions of right-vs.-left or party-vs.-party. Trump has no seeming regard for public order, and sees things instead in ideological or partisan terms, as Us vs. Them. (None of his predecessors ever, even once, thought of any street thugs as part of "us.")  Or, even worse, Trump owes his allegiance to chaos itself. He is a representative of disorder, and thrives on it. That is a terrifying thought.

I would usually say that this is the kind of behavior that could get someone killed. But it's too late to say that now. Someone is already dead.

(cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.)

Presidential Pardons and Obstruction of Justice

One thing is finally clear about the Russia investigation, thanks to Donald Trump, Jr.'s decision to tweet his incriminating e-mails: someone is going to prison over this. All three principals who took that meeting looking for Russian oppo research, Manafort, Kushner, and Trump, Jr., are likely in serious criminal jeopardy. Other figures (like Flynn, Sessions, and peripheral creeps Eric Prince, Carter Page, and Roger Stone) may be in danger of prison as well. But the Trump Tower Three certainly are.

The best advice any lawyer could give Donald Trump, Jr. is to flip, to make a deal with the prosecutors (immediately, right now) and agree to testify against someone higher up. But that is never going to happen, because it would mean turning on his own father, Donald Senior. Trump Junior is clearly unequipped for that. It would be hard for anyone to turn evidence on your mother or father, and Donald Junior isn't able to stand up to his father about much more trivial things. Not going to happen.

On the other hand, Donald Senior is not about to see his own son, or his favorite son-in-law Kushner, go to federal prison. So at some point President Trump may find himself overwhelmingly tempted to use his presidential pardon power. Pardoning people for crimes that helped put Trump himself in office would, under any of the usual American standards, be political suicide, but that does not mean Trump won't do it. He can't resist the temptation to tweet nasty things at cable TV personalities; he has nothing like the willpower or integrity to stay out of a Trump Junior prosecution. Trump does not believe the rules apply to him, which is what makes him so dangerous to the republic as a leader, but he also genuinely does not understand how rules, laws, or the Constitution actually work.

So Trump may trigger a genuine Constitutional crisis, triggering an unresolved problem in the Constitution itself: the danger that the President will use his pardon authority to carry out crimes against the Constitutional order, giving his accomplices impunity. Yes, the President would still be subject to impeachment and removal, but there would be no remedy short of that.

My (admittedly quick) glance at The Federalist (#69 and #74), doesn't help much. In #69, Hamilton concerns himself with plots for a military seizure of power, which is no longer necessary in an executive that commands a powerful standing army and security establishment. In #74, Hamilton is more concerned with Shays's Rebellion, which had after all helped prompt the Constitutional Convention, and focuses on the President's authority to pardon rebels as a tool for restoring domestic peace. (Hamilton is responding to the argument that the President should need at least one house of Congress to confirm pardons, and points to the Shays's Rebellion pardons as evidence for the benefits of the power to assure a speedy pardon.) You can say that the Framers did not quite plan for this situation, or perhaps more accurately you can say that the Framers gave Congress impeachment power to deal with it. But only the impeachment power.

So what happens if Trump decides to pardon his own confederates who are facing criminal charges for their work on his campaign? What if he pardons Kushner? Or what if he pardons Flynn and Manafort (both of whom are more likely to turn cooperating witness, because they're not related to Trump and might be looking at serious prison time)? Does he have the legal power to do that? The most likely answer is that he has the power, because it's one of the powers of his office, but using it would be a crime.

How can this be? Because doing something that is otherwise perfectly legal can become a crime when it is done to obstruct justice. Trump has the legal right to fire the FBI Director; firing the FBI Director to stop an investigation into his own advisers is obstruction of justice. Trump has the right to pardon federal criminals; pardoning one of his own flunkies to keep the flunky from testifying against Trump is criminal obstruction.

Put it this way: it is legal for me to buy a house. It is legal for me to pay more than asking price for a house (in fact, in some housing markets you have to). And it is legal to buy the District Attorney's house if he's selling it; public servants have to be allowed to sell their homes, too.

BUT, if I am under investigation by the District Attorneys office and I then offer to buy his house for, say, $100,000 more than the asking price (this is Cleveland; in San Francisco say a million over asking price) then it's attempted bribery and obstruction. Everything I did was legal, but I did it in order to obtain an illegal result. That is how the pardon power works, too. Chris Christie has the legal power to pardon criminal offenses in New Jersey; if he pardoned all of his own aides involved in Bridgegate, that's a new crime, because he would obviously be obstructing justice.

So if Donald Trump tries to squelch the Russia investigation by firing more investigators, or by pardoning his personal aides who are under investigation, that is obstruction and pretty clearly illegal. But the only remedy would be for Congress to impeach him.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Ask the Blue States About Terrorism

Here are a few pictures from Copley Square in Boston, where the Boston Marathon ends:

But as you can see, they are not from April's running of the Marathon. They are from a January demonstration against Trump's Muslim Ban.

And yes, that means that Boston held a massive demonstration for Muslim immigrants' rights right next to the site of a shocking terrorist attack by two Muslim immigrants. Just for logistical reasons, a lot of protestors must have had to walk across the Marathon's finish line, and by the sites of the bombs themselves.

A sign that Boston has forgotten the Marathon bombings? Oh hell no. They are still all too fresh in that city's mind. A sign that Bostonians don't care about the victims, or aren't serious about fighting terrorism? Don't be ridiculous.

A small explanation is that Copley Square happens to be Boston's best place for large gatherings like this, so that you have the crowds of protestors in the same public square where you have the crowds of cheering running fans. But the bigger explanation is that Boston, like many so-called blue cities, is both anti-terrorist and pro-immigrant. If that seems not to make sense to you, let me just say: these people are literally standing in a place that they know terrorists have attacked. They are literally putting themselves on the line here, so you maybe you should hear them out.

One of the oddities of American political life today is that our approach to terrorism is being dictated by the people in the least danger of a terrorist attack.


Here are the top US targets for foreign terrorists:
New York City
Washington, DC
Los Angeles
Chicago
San Francisco

Maybe San Francisco makes that top tier, and maybe it belongs in the next one, with places like Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Seattle, etc. etc. etc. But let's be honest: if Al-Qaeda or Daesh aka "ISIS" spends months planning a complicated attack on US soil, it's almost certainly going to be in one of those four or five top targets. Those are the places they care about; those are the places they've heard about. And those are the places that have large symbolic value overseas. International Islamist terrorists dream of destroying LAX and Times Square and the Capitol Dome. They are not interested in the so-called American Heartland. Islamist terrorists from overseas would never attack Oklahoma City, for example, because they don't really know where Oklahoma City is.

Now, that doesn't mean that Oklahoma City isn't a great place to live. It can be wonderful without being internationally famous. I've lived in a bunch of places that overseas terrorists have never heard of, and those places were nice. But the truth is terrorists aren't interested in underrated places that are nice to live. They're interested in attacking famous places. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but national security is more important than your feelings or mine.

Now one of the things animating our red/blue split is a deep division on what to do with terrorism. Everyone agrees that terrorism is a serious problem. The general Red Team approach to terrorism is that this is a deep national emergency that calls for shutting down immigration, increased military strikes overseas, and heavy ethnic profiling of Muslims: in some cases outright demonization of Islam itself. The Blue Team strategy calls for a mix of police and military responses with diplomacy, patience and outreach. The Blue strategy is built around trying to isolate the terrorists and sharpen the divide between them and everyday Muslims. The Red strategy considers that a hopeless cause, and demands that we use the hammer as hard as we can, everywhere. Sometimes it considers Islam itself the problem. Blue voters see making the fight about Islam itself as one of the worst and most self-destructive things to do: basically pushing people into the terrorists' arms.

Now, these strategies work against each other. You can only follow one. Either you're doing outreach to Muslims, or you're denouncing Islam. And both sides feel that the other strategy is dangerous and self-destructive.

Because we're a democracy, we resolve this conflict by voting. And over the last few elections, the Red voters have won, and we're following the Red strategy. But here's the problem:

The places that the terrorists target are overwhelmingly Blue, full of Blue voters. New York, Chicago, LA, DC, San Francisco: all super blue. Almost, like, ultra-violet. A lot of the second tier targets are likewise blue: either the Democratic strongholds of Democratic states, or the Blue island in a Red or Purple State. Boston. Miami. Philly. Seattle. If terrorists ever attack Missouri, God forbid, it will be in Democratic-voting St. Louis. If, God forbid, terrorists attack Georgia, it will be in central Atlanta. That's how the terrorists' strategy works. They want large, busy, and well-known urban areas.Those are the places that are pro-urban, pro-trade, and generally pro-immigrant. They are also the places where the most American immigrants are.

In fact, the Red strategy has one precisely because it's favored in less populated rural areas. More people vote for Blue candidates, both for President and for Congress, but our system builds in an advantage for rural districts so that a smaller number of voters defeat a larger, but more geographically concentrated, group of voters.

So we're following the Red anti-terrorism strategy, but the Blue voters are the targets. They are the ones at risk. If we try the Blue strategy and fail, it's Blue voters whose lives are at risk. But if we follow the Red strategy and it fails, most of the Red voters will still be safe in their rural areas. Their mistakes won't get them killed. Daesh (aka "ISIS") is not going to be launching any attacks on Youngstown, Ohio or rural Wisconsin. Not now, and probably not ever.

So let me suggest that maybe the Blue-state voters, and the urban-blue-pocket voters may know what they're doing. They may have actually thought this through. Don't tell them that they don't take terrorism seriously. A lot of them live in New York City. And even if they are wrong, they deserve to be listened to, because they have skin in the game -- sometimes all of their skin in the game -- in the way most of the rest of us do not. If you find yourself puzzled and frustrated by the politicians and the policies they vote for, the approach to fighting terrorism that they support, let me translate what those urban Blue voters are saying to the rest us:

Publicly hating Islam is not helping. Stereotyping people is not helping. You are making it worse. Please, please don't get us killed. Thanks. 

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

How This White House Lies

Donald Trump is both one of the most gifted liars in American politics, a genius of dishonesty, and at the same time hopelessly bad at lying. His lawless firing of FBI Director Comey shows the ineptitude. Trump led with a story so weak that no one could pretend to believe it and then, within forty-eight hours had abandoned that story for one that was actually more incriminating. A White House that keeps changing its story is in crisis. A White House that changes it story to something more damaging is out of its mind.

The problem for Trump is that his approach to lying, which has been enormously effective for most of his career, is not working in this situation. The problem for Trump's press secretary and deputy press secretary, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is not just that they are being sent out to lie, but that they are sent out to lie like Trump himself, without Trump's skill set, even in situations where Trump's approach is wrong.

There are two things that make a lie work. Some lies work because they are plausible. Others work because they are emotionally satisfying. Some lies are both, of course, but others work by being one or the other.

A plausible lie is one that seems believable from an objective standpoint. It's false, but the falsehood sounds likely: it's the kind of thing that actually does happen, it doesn't contradict any known facts, there's no real reason not to believe it. A stockbroker claims to be bringing in, say, 15% more money a year for clients than he really is; you would need to see his books to bust him on that lie, whereas if he claimed to be doubling clients' money every six months it simply wouldn't be plausible. If I pretended to be close buddies with some of the famous people I went to college with, it would take some time and effort, or some bad luck on my part, to bust me. A google search will show that I actually did graduate from the same college as those people did, in the same year, so for all you know we might once have had some deep conversation in the dining hall. The lie is plausible.

An emotionally satisfying lie, on the other hand, is one that satisfies the listener's emotional needs. It may not make them happy -- in fact, it may make them fearful or enraged -- but it hooks them. It fulfills their need to feel loved, it offers a way out of medical or financial trouble, it offers them a scapegoat for their failures, it confirms their belief that they have been persecuted. (See Michael Wolraich's Blowing Smoke for the addictive power of "feeling hard done by.") And if the listener wants or needs to believe badly enough, the lie doesn't have to be that plausible. If you really want to blame Mexican immigrants for losing your job, the fact that immigration for Mexico is actually declining does not matter a bit; you won't even take that fact on board. People on Twitter have been congratulating Trump for going to Israel when Obama did not, which is completely ridiculous. Obama did go to Israel, of course. It only takes five seconds to check. But the people the lie is aimed at don't want to check. They want to believe.

Most Washington Beltway types, the reporters and lawyers and Congressional staffers and so on who make up most of our political and chattering classes, tend to lie as plausibly as they can. If they're going to tell a falsehood, they will try to make that falsehood as probable-sounding and hard to check as they can manage. Sooner or later every White House Press Secretary has to tell a lie, large or small; when they do, they make it as plausible as they can, because they know they can't bank on their listeners' desire to believe. They're talking to an audience that wants to fact-check them, so they craft lies that can stand up to scrutiny from skeptical and dispassionate, or even hostile, observers. Washington, DC and New York City are cities of plausible liars.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is an absolute master of the emotionally satisfying lie. His genius is telling people what they want -- no, need -- to hear, and getting them to invest their emotions in the lie. And like many people with a gift for emotionally satisfying lies, he has a tendency to believe his own falsehoods, at least some of the time.

Emotionally-satisfying lies are key for people who need small groups of people to believe in them intensely. That includes con artists, cult leaders, and domestic abusers. (I am not calling the President a domestic abuser, and certainly not calling him a religious leader of any kind. I'm just talking about how he lies.) Those liars get their targets deeply keyed up, and deal with attacks on their credibility with various rationalizations and counter-attacks. They are just saying that because they're trying to drive us apart, baby. Don't listen when your mother tries to break us up. These lies don't have to make any sense; they just have to give the believers some way to keep believing. The most successful lie in history, alas, is probably the abuser's special: I only hit you because I love you. That lie works, until it stops working, because the victim cannot bear the truth that the abuser does not love them.

Most journalists and politicians, because they are plausible liars, don't understand how Trump functions at all. Those are not the lies they would tell. That is not the model they follow. Trump's lies only make sense when you understand them as aimed at people who are already in his bunker, sipping his delicious Kool-Aid. This is fake news! This is just people who hate Trump! It's core emotional appeal to believers.

Trump's big problem is that lies designed for bunker-dwellers break down under the scrutiny of the wider world. An abuser's victim may believe he hits her because he loves her; she may need to believe that he hits her because he loves her. But the District Attorney never believes that shit for a second. An abuser who brings those lies into a court of law is in for a world of (well-deserved) hurt. Implausible but emotionally-satisfying lies don't work for an audience that hasn't bought into them emotionally. A cult leader talking to people outside the bunker just sounds crazy and sad.

Emotionally-satisfying lies to a core audience have gotten Trump where he is today. But it's always, always time for plausibility when the police show up. Emotionally-satisfying lie do not help when you're under investigation. They will probably hurt you. Cops don't want to believe you. Lawyers and reporters don't want to believe you. Judges do not want to believe you. They want to hear the truth, and if you can't give them that you need a lie they can't poke holes in.

Trump needed to switch gears when the investigations began. He didn't, because he's probably not capable. He is emotionally dependent upon the same lies that his believers are.

Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, on the other hand, have an even more intractable problem. They are forced to go out and tell the Washington press corps, the people for whom banal but plausible lies are designed, a series of Trump-like lies: emotionally satisfying to Trump, utterly implausible, and dead in the water to an audience who's not already strongly biased toward Trump. Largest inauguration crowd in history is a classic of its kind. Transparently false, but exciting for people who want to believe it. But that's a catastrophic lie to tell to the Post and the Times.

Certainly, with Trump seemingly in genuine legal jeopardy, his flacks should be sticking to the plausible fictions. But those obviously are not their orders. Instead, they are marched out with outrageously flimsy BS, like "Trump fired Comey for being unfair to Hillary," which not only fails to convince reporters but antagonizes them and makes them pay closer attention to everything you're trying to hide. Big, big mistake. And Spicer, for whom I feel the kind of pity I feel for some of the sufferers in Dante's Hell, is also forced to tell Trump-like likes without anything like Trump's talent for telling them. Spicer, really, should stick to believable bullshit. Trump's grandiose disregard for truth requires Trump's grandiosity and emotional conviction, his instinct for telling his rubes victims voters what they need to hear and his own deeply needy emotional commitment to his lies. These really are not the kind of lies you can hire a middleman to tell for you. You need to tell them yourself. But sooner or later, you will need to deal with the truth.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

The Moral Necessity of the Civil War

So, Donald Trump said some stupid and ignorant things about the Civil War. Not much of that is worth discussing: the man says stupid and ignorant things because, well, he's stupid and ignorant, so there isn't much to analyze. The one part we should stop to think about is Trump's conviction that the Civil War should have been avoided. That's not an idea that he came up with on his own. He doesn't come up with ideas on his own. He picks them up from outside. This idea has been around a long time.

Trump regrets the Civil War. He wishes that the Civil War had not been fought. He got those ideas from other people, and those people are very, very wrong.

Let me say, up front, that if there had been a way to free every American slave without bloodshed, that would have been great. I am not for American lives being lost at Gettysburg, any more than I am for American lives being lost on Omaha Beach. But I do not regret that the United States defeated the Confederacy any more than I regret that United States defeated the Nazis. I will say this clearly: the Civil War was a good thing.

Trump is voicing the regret that the Civil War was fought at all, the regret that white Americans had to come to blows with one another over something as trivial as the freedom of black Americans. "No reason" for it, in Trump's words, as if the freedom of millions upon millions of souls were not a reason.

But history, our own history shows us that there was no peaceful bargain that could have freed the slaves, for the simple reason that slave-holders stubbornly refused to release their captives. There was no compromise on the table: the Confederacy rebelled rather than accept any further compromise.

And freeing the slaves, all of the slaves, is not a negotiable demand. Slavery is a terrible crime. It is inexcusable.

Now, somehow all of this has become impolite to say. You are supposed to be considerate of white Southerners' feelings about slavery. It is considered rude to speak about their ancestors' horrific crimes against millions of people without considering the delicacy of their feelings. In fact, you're supposed to say something polite about how awful Reconstruction is, which is like talking about how terrible the GIs who liberated the concentration camps were. I'm through with it. The truth is the truth.

Is this about regional pride? Okay then. As a Northerner, I take enormous regional pride in the defeat of the Confederacy and much deeper human pride in the abolition of slavery. Those are great and precious achievements. If you are an American but are not proud of these things, you cannot call yourself a patriot.

Now, saying this in such a crude way is considered "incivility." That was exactly how it was framed before the Civil War, as certain white people in both the South and the North deplored the rudeness and incivility of the slavery debate. By this, they meant the intemperate rudeness of the anti-slavery side. The same complaint echoes through the 1840s and 1850s: wasn't terrible that people couldn't just put aside their trivial differences and get along in harmony?

"People," in this formulation, means white people. What about the black people? They, and their human rights were the "trivial differences" meant to be put aside in the name of good manners.

Ever since the Civil War there has been a cultural and political project of reconciliation, meaning reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners. This project, like the antebellum campaign for compromise and civility, focuses on solidarity between white Americans at black Americans' expense. Black citizens' rights are not only ignored, but deliberately kept out of the conversation as a potential obstacle to white people singing Kumbaya with each other.

This can't-we-get-along project fosters the ridiculous lie that the Civil War was somehow not about slavery, the explicit declarations of the Confederates notwithstanding.We're told that the Civil War was "complex" and had many subtle causes, as if the issue of slavery alone did not dwarf every single one of those causes. And the noble cause of white people's harmony requires Northerners to be tactful and nearly apologetic about the war. Northerners are expected to seek Southerners' forgiveness for stopping their ancestors' monstrous crimes against humanity.

To hell with that. The Civil War was about slavery, and it was the slavers' fault. No subtlety or nuance is important enough to change those basic facts. Those are the central truths, and the rest are details around the edges. The Civil War was never going to be fought over tariff policy.

But these are still the unwritten rules of civility in America, especially around discussions of race. No one expressly announces these rules, and no one could, because they are morally depraved. But they are carefully followed: you can observe them in our politics and our media. The unspoken rule is that white people are meant to be polite and respectful to other white people at all costs, and disrespect to a fellow white is mannerless incivility. Defending the rights (and basic humanity) of non-white people is never treated as an excuse for being "uncivil" to a white person, least of all a white man. Rather, "incivility" is treated as yet more offensive when performed on behalf of people of color. To impugn a white person, and disrupt the serenity of American intra-honky harmony on behalf of someone considered lower down the racial hierarchy is treated as a particular insult and outrage.

This is why in some conservative quarters calling someone a racist is considered the most horrendous and unpardonable offense. Not because the accused person is not a racist, but because they are, because (although this can not be stated) they consider it morally outrageous to violate a fellow white person's privilege or to embarrass them on behalf of anyone from another race. The "anti-racists are the real racist" response is built on the deep emotional conviction that blacks, Latinos, etc., are indeed inferior and that it is a mortal insult to be upbraided for the sake of a person that one does not accept as an equal.

Do you think I'm wrong? Watch cable news for a week. Listen to your loud uncle at Thanksgiving. Watch the tape of Mitch McConnell silencing Elizabeth Warren for incivility. The incivility is calling another white person to account for their racist words and deeds. Jeff Sessions's racist words and racist actions are matters of public record  It is treated as the greatest of sins. Shooting unarmed black children is deemed, by some, and honest mistake, but calling other people racist is treated as entirely beyond the pale.

That is the logic that imagines the Civil War an unnecessary tragedy: a world view that imagines white folk as fully alive and human, meant to live in untroubled harmony together, and views the problems -- even the most basic rights and needs -- of other races as insignificant issues that must not be allowed to disrupt white folks' mutual amity.


But the Civil War, although tragic in its means, resulted in triumph. The liberation of millions of human souls from bondage is one of the greatest victories of all time. Would it have been better if those millions of Americans had been freed voluntarily? Yes. But that was not going to happen. And they had to be freed. I thank God for that victory. And I bless the Republican Party that did it, a Republican party that we my never see again.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Take Action on the Muslim Ban: Stop Sessions

The Administration has handcuffed legal American residents and detained them without charges as part of the President's pointless, lawless Muslim ban. It's a great moment to protest, an even better moment to donate to the ACLU and CAIR. But also be sure to call both your senators on Monday and demand that they make Jeff Sessions explain his position on this. If the President will not follow the Constitution or the law then we need an Attorney General who will.

Call both of your senators' offices. Speak briefly and politely. Ask that the Senator not vote to confirm Sessions as Attorney General until Sessions tells Congress whether or not the ban is legal. If you have time, add that you are concerned that Sessions's long-time aide, Stephen Miller, helped write this ban. The committee vote on Sessions is Tuesday; make sure to call before then,

Attorney General is THE key position for any administration that wants to dismantle our democracy, or to keep it from being dismantled. After World War II, when many future Iron Curtain countries in Europe had coalition governments combining Communists and non-Communists, the Communists always made sure that they got the position comparable to Attorney General: the Interior Minister, who controlled the internal police and security functions. Then the pro-Soviet Communists used their control of the police and the counterintelligence services to take control of the country, so there were no more coalition governments. In Czechoslovakia, the Communists took the Interior Ministry and the leader of the democratic mainstream party took the more prestigious role of Foreign Minister. Then the Communists threw the Foreign Minister out a high window and the security police ruled it suicide. The Secretary of State can't start a coup, or stop one. The Attorney General could do both.

The Attorney General controls the FBI, oversees voting rights, prosecutes all federal crimes, supervises our efforts to catch foreign spies. The Attorney General could lay off prosecuting spies from particular foreign governments. The Attorney General can simply choose not to prosecute crimes committed on the Administration's behalf. It's an extremely dangerous position in the wrong hands.

On the positive side, a principled Attorney General helped bring Richard Nixon down. A good Attorney General can save our country.

Stopping Jeff Sessions is one of the most important things we can do. If he gets confirmed anyway, but has to publicly repudiate one of Trump's policies to do it, that could also be very valuable, because Trump will be angry and we want their working relationship to be as damaged as it can be. An Attorney General who won't do Trump's dirty work for him is what we need.

Call both of your senators, please. Trump has made it clear that he intends to govern lawlessly and unconstitutionally. But he has made a mistake by moving too obviously, too soon, before he had his Attorney General and Supreme Court pick in place. Let's make him pay for that mistake, now, before he can solidify unlawful power.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Having a Partisan Thanksgiving

I hope you've all had a happy and relaxing Thanksgiving. I was lucky to host this year, with both my wife's family and mine traveling here to scenic Ohio, and I was also the lucky cook. (I took over turkey and gravy a few years ago, but this was my first year doing the whole meal, and -- since people had traveled to see us -- also feeding the crew on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.) And I was lucky enough to avoid political arguments at the table, because no one in my family voted for Trump. But political arguments on Thanksgiving are not the end of the world. Thanksgiving, as a national holiday, is the direct result of political conflict, and it's a mistake for us to forget that.

So, a quick history lesson:

Everybody knows the story about the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation. And that's true, in the sense that the event really did take place. But that's not when Thanksgiving became a national or even a regular holiday. The Pilgrims didn't have another Thanksgiving the next November. And some people know the historical fact that Lincoln proclaimed the first regular, national Thanksgiving, although that fact tends to confuse people. How did this holiday get founded twice, first in 1621 and then in 1863? And how can it be that Thanksgiving's two original moments happen more than 240 years apart?

A quick google search will explain that Lincoln simply set a standard national date for Thanksgiving, which different states were celebrating on different days. And that is part of the story. But that makes it sound as if the whole country was already united behind Thanksgiving, which only the logistical problem of deciding when to have it. That's not true. (Think "things left to the states to decide" and "Lincoln" and you'll see where this story is going.)

The real truth is that Thanksgiving was originally part of America's cultural wars, and so was Christmas. We now think of those two holidays as part of a single season, but they used to be indirectly (and sometimes pretty directly) opposed to each other. Not everyone celebrated both, and the division between the holidays broke down on regional, religious, and ideological lines.

Thanksgiving is a New England thing. It was originally a regional holiday, celebrated by New Englanders. It's also, not to put too fine a point on it, a Puritan holiday, celebrated in the Northeast by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and other churches with Puritan roots. Thanksgiving was especially valuable to these Puritan-leaning New Englanders because they did not celebrate Christmas. They actively despised Christmas as a lot of heathenish nonsense. Celebrating it, or even closing the store on December 25, went against their religious beliefs.

On the other hand, Christmas was widely celebrated in the South, which had been heavily settled by Anglicans who observed the traditional liturgical holidays. (New York was also a stronghold of Christmas, partly because of its old Dutch roots and partly because it was such an ethnic and religious melting pot.) But plenty of Southerners wanted nothing to do with Thanksgiving. They saw it as alien: a celebration of another region's culture and another denomination's beliefs. They were not wrong. A lot of Southerners also saw Thanksgiving as an abolitionist thing, and they weren't wrong about that either. The lead campaigner for Thanksgiving as a national holiday was the novelist Sarah Josepha Hale: a feminist Yankee abolitionist. Thanksgiving was against Southern values.

Christmas spread more or less nationwide in the 1840s and 1850s, although it did not become a legal federal holiday until 1870. But it was slowest to spread in New England and, although I don't want to overstate the case, there was at least some overlap between the people campaigning for Christmas in New England and the people campaigning for national unity and brotherhood, meaning appeasing Southerners on the slavery question. Thanksgiving spread out across the country as well, perhaps more slowly, because people kept moving west from New England to places like Michigan and Ohio and bringing Thanksgiving with them. So there was eventually an overlap where states celebrated both holidays, but Thanksgiving in November did not really spread in the South.

Thanksgiving, our holiday of national unity and togetherness, became a national holiday because the North won the war. Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving nine months after the Emancipation Proclamation. Sarah Josepha Hale was happy about both. American Thanksgiving was a victory for Northern abolitionist values.

We don't remember all of this story, because we don't like to remember it. Our country can never forget the Civil War, but we work very hard to forget the twenty or thirty years that led up to it. We like to talk about unity and civility and getting past partisan divisions. We don't like to remember that unity, civility, and compromise were key arguments for continuing to permit slavery. We forget that the opponents of slavery were called divisive and accused of tearing the country apart. If we remember that, we would have to remember that the Civil Rights Movement was accused of tearing the country apart, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was called a radical communist. We would have to remember that the people calling for unity and mutual understanding in the 1950s and early 1960s were calling for more sympathy for Southern segregationists and their feelings about their local traditions, that demands for justice were called unnecessarily confrontational.

We like to tell ourselves a story about a united, harmonious nation, joined in consensus. That story is neither true nor healthy. Our history is one of repeated confrontations over core national principles, and maybe most importantly a history of confrontation over race. And, time and again, Americans who stand up for racial equality, for America's best republican-with-a-small-r traditions, are accused of incivility and divisiveness. Because the cardinal rule of American political etiquette, in 1856 and in 1956 and in 2016, is that it is divisive and uncivil to take non-whites' side against one's fellow white people. How can you be so unpleasant and make such trouble, when surely whatever this problem is can wait?

That's still the story today, when there are public calls to unify behind the most divisive political figure in modern history, a politician who only sees some Americans as real Americans. The call for "unity" is a call to accept that racist, tribal definition of America, to "unify" by excluding a third of our fellow citizens and to pretend that they are not "really" American. That isn't unity. And that isn't the America I celebrate.

But Thanksgiving is a reminder of one old, deep strand in the American spirit, a strand that has stood by unpopular principle and resisted wrongful power. That's the spirit of the Pilgrim Separatists at Plymouth, and the spirit of the New England abolitionists who followed after them, with a heavy helping of Revolutionary patriots in between. I am grateful for that American legacy, which we need today as much as we ever have.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

I'm Staying American. How About You?

Because I love my country, Tuesday's election broke my heart. My fellow Americans -- less than half of us, but still too many -- turned their backs on what is best in our country to elect a man who has no love and no understanding of the things that make America great: freedom and equality.

Somewhere between forty-seven and forty-eight percent of voters decided that they wanted a race-baiting authoritarian instead. Those voters turned out not to love the same country I do, not to love it for the reasons it is worth loving.

But I still believe in that America. I believe in the America of liberty, equality, and justice for all, the America that has not always lived up to its values but still always had them. I am not quitting on that country. I was raised to love it, and I will die believing in it.

If America is about white people hating brown people, you can have it. That version of America can go to hell, and will. Yes, I know our history of racist violence and plunder. I cannot deny it. But I have no allegiance to that history. The America I believe in, the America worth believing in, has always existed alongside that uglier vision. They are the wrestling sides of the American soul. I am not done wrestling. If we give up on our better angels, there's no country left for me to love.

For the last five nights and days, I have been asking myself what I am going to do now. And I still have no answer but Whatever I have to. The path forward is not yet clear, and I am not ready for everything I may need to do. I am not eager for any of it. This is not the fight I would have chosen.

But I have had it easy. I grew up lucky in a free country, in a generation that was not asked much. I was a sunshine patriot, born in the sun. I could praise the heroes of our past, the Franklins and the Lincolns and the Dr. Kings, without having to ask if I would have met their challenge. That isn't true anymore. I wish it were, but it's not.

Some generations are asked to go to Valley Forge: to stand by their country when the outlook is darkest. Some generations are chosen to stand up for the American experiment, to risk and suffer for it, to bear witness. We have now become one of those generations, and we are off to a sorry start.  But this, of all times, is not the time to quit. This is when America, the America we grew up loving, needs us most. The time for the sunshine patriot is gone. These are the times that try men's souls.

crossposted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog



freedom for all under the law, equal protection and opportunity, and America dedicated to expanding

Outsourcing Political Violence: Trump and Daesh

There are still three months to go and we've already gotten to the smirking-death-threats portion of our general election. I can't even say that I'm surprised Trump did it. I just never expected it so early, and I'm sickened by the thought of how much lower the man will sink by November 8. It will get even worse. I mean, of course it will. There's no doubt. But I'm not looking forward to it.

If you have any doubts, or buy any spin, about whether or not Trump intended to threaten Clinton, stop listening tot he clip itself and listen to what he's said since. His campaign's apology isn't just a lie, but an aggressively transparent lie. It is an eff-you lie, designed to show contempt for the person being lied and challenge them to dispute the naked falsehood. (Eff-you lies re a key part of Trump's campaign M.O.)  And more important is what he hasn't said. At no point has he said explicitly, or even had his surrogates say, "We do not want any harm to come to Secretary Clinton." Trump hasn't said that because he doesn't want his followers to hear him saying that. Is it just his personality disorder, keeping him from ever apologizing or admitting a mistake? Is it fear of turning off his hard-core followers who are excited by the death threats? Does it even matter?

So we've reached the perennial question of Campaign 2016: Is It Fascism Yet? Today's answer is: close (all too close), but not quite.

I don't believe that Trump actually planned to threaten Clinton before the moment that he did it. Trump, as you may have noticed, does not think ahead. I think he improvised the threat in response to crowd mood, which is what Trump does at his rallies: feels out his crowd and gives them what they want. The problem, then, is that we now have a sizable number of our fellow Americans who want to go to a campaign rally and hear one candidate for President call for the other candidate's blood. That is a bad, bad thing, and threatens to be a problem long after Trump himself is gone. Trump himself is bad. But the audience Trump has attracted is worse, and might someday be harnessed by a demagogue more directly dangerous than Trump.

Trump has clearly identified, and responded to, a troubling appetite for political violence. What he hasn't done, and doesn't have the skills to do, is to actually organize political violence. I'd like to think he wouldn't have the stomach for that. I'm confident that he doesn't have the organizational ability. Trump isn't going to turn his most blood-thirsty followers into a cadre of brownshirts because, really. Trump can't even open a damned field office. Trump rallies are a ripe recruiting ground for potential thugs, but Trumps campaign can't even turn those rallies into a decent voter-contact list.

Instead, Trump is outsourcing the threat of violence: floating the threat out there in a nominally deniable way and seeing if anyone takes him up on it. Trump  has not thought through what would happen if some Travis Bickle out there took him at his word. or the horrible blowback he would suffer if, God forbid, someone actually took a shot at Clinton; Trump has not thought, in the normal sense of that word, at all. But he's played the same game before, in the primaries, when he muttered about "riots in the streets" if he were denied the nomination. And there the threat was clearly made in his direct political interests, suggesting to the Republican Party that people might use violence on Trump's behalf. This is a card Trump plays. He doesn't orchestrate violence, but uses code words that might lead someone else to become violent for him.

This strategy is very much like Trump's post-bankruptcy approach to real estate. Trump no longer puts up big buildings. He doesn't have the money or the credit with major lenders to do that. Instead, he attaches his name and brand to buildings other people finance and build. In the same way, he seems open to lending his name and brand to political violence that he, himself, does not have the ability to pull off. He can't afford his own stormtroopers, so he's exploring options for outsourcing.

What Trump has done also, alarmingly, echoes the even uglier strategy of Islamist terrorists like al-Qaeda and Daesh (the group often called "ISIS." I prefer the name Daesh, because they hate it.) Now, I am NOT comparing anything Trump has done to the scale or direct culpability of a group like Daesh. But those groups also outsource a lot of their violence. They cannot actually do nearly as much harm as they would like, so they spread their brand on social media and hope some poor, demented Travis Bickle type decides to declare allegiance to them before his grotesque murder-suicide. This makes the suicidal Travis Bickle feel connected to something bigger than his sad, failed self, and makes Daesh/ISIS/al-Qaeda appear capable of more violence, with a longer reach, than they can actually make happen on their own dime. In this way, terrorism and political violence in the 21st century is weirdly mimicking corporate behavior, reducing their own direct capabilities and outsourcing core activities through branding arrangements. If this is the future, I hate it.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

What to Watch For

So, they're finally here. After months of anxious preparation here in our city, the Republican National Convention has come to Cleveland. The city is as carefully groomed and as nervous as a teenager before the prom. The pedestrian walk on East 4th Street is filled with broadcast booths. High-end restaurants have turned into the temporary headquarters of Bloomberg or Twitter. The park in Public Square has been completely, and beautifully renovated; we had to close it down for more than a year. The construction scaffolds are finally gone from Euclid Avenue, but new traffic barriers and fences are up. It's impossible to know which roads will be blocked off, where you can drive and where you can't. I won't be going back downtown until this is over. I'll be up in the Heights, holding my breath.

What goes on in the convention hall doesn't concern me. If the Republican Party and its loathsome nominee want to screw up on national television, that's their business. What happens in the streets matters enormously. We're trying to build this city up. We really don't need any additional trouble.

So I'm worried about protests turning into confrontations, because peaceful demonstrations can attract hangers-on who have no peaceful intentions. I'm worried about violent opportunists, including various lone-wolf lunatics, who might choose Cleveland as a target to attack. I'm nervous about a police department with some ugly recent history being put on edge by recent attacks against police.
I'm downright terrified by the open-carry activists who have apparently already taken to standing in Public Square with goddamn AR-15s, basically insuring that nearly anything that goes bad will go worse. And I'm nervous that pro-Trump demonstrators will look for an excuse to go after Black Lives Matter or other anti-Trump demonstrators. One of the things that's scary about this situation, and different from previous conventions, is the possibility of ideologically-opposed demonstrators looking for a brawl.

The good news is that many of the armed and/or truculent fringe groups who previously planned to descend on Cleveland to declare their allegiance to "protect" Trump and his followers, have now decided to skip the show. I'm more than happy that the Oath Keepers, the white supremacists, and the Bikers for Trump won't be arriving. (h/t to the great JJ Macnab's Twitter feed for providing updates on these groups). I watched the head of Bikers for Trump on the local news this week, raving about "protecting" Trump and "protecting" the police and keeping anti-Trump protestors in line. That, obviously, is the most brilliant event-safety idea since the Rolling Stones hired the Hell's Angels to provide concert security at Altamount. (To give Donald Trump his very limited due here, he did not explicitly invite any of these yahoos to Cleveland, while Mick Jagger actually went out and hired the Angels.) But the Bikers for Trump guy could not get a parade permit, so he's not coming. That gust of wind you hear in the trees is my sigh of relief, all the way from Ohio.

We're at a tense moment when people are wondering if we can maintain our civil peace and our democracy, when we can no longer entirely avoid the debate over whether or not Trump represents a genuine American fascism. That argument is endless, because "fascism" has never been especially well defined, but I do want to point to one thing we should look out for.

Authoritarian regimes generally, and fascist regimes specifically, tend to have a body of irregular, semi-official thugs, separate from the official security forces. Those groups conduct most of the violence and intimidation. Hitler had his brown shirts, the original Storm Troopers; Mussolini had his black shirts. But tyrants with different ideologies often have the same groups: the Duvalier regime in Haiti had its tontons macoutes, the Iranian mullahs have their "people's militia," the basij. The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi was conducted by local militia. The Klan, a nominally secret society, carried out terrorism against southern blacks from the 1860s through the 1960s. Dictators don't necessarily send the army or the police. They often have these irregular groups to break windows and bust heads outside the official apparatus of power, and to help keep that apparatus in the tyrant's hands.

Donald Trump is, at best, a racist demagogue with no respect for the Constitution. He is a real danger to American democracy. But so far, he has not mobilized the support of any irregular or paramilitary forces. Should that ever happen, it will be a sign that things have taken a hard turn for the worse.

Trump has had some impromptu violence at his rallies, which he has both incited and pretended not to incite. But violent rally-goers have not yet formed any organization. So far they're just one-time, single-use mobs, and the Trump campaign doesn't necessarily have the skills or discipline to organize them as campaign volunteers, let alone as a paramilitary auxiliary. There are plenty of unsavory folks around Trump, but -- thank heavens -- he doesn't have an Ernst Rohm.

There are also pre-existing paramilitary groups who are clearly excited by Trump and willing to follow him: the Oath Keepers, the Three Percent Militia, and various white supremacist types including some chapters of the Klan. The actual capacities of these groups, as opposed to their fantasies, are not really clear. But these are people who talk about various kinds of action to promote their ideologies, and extra-legal violence is part of their ideology.

The Trump campaign has not taken these groups on board. Trump's own approach to them is the familiar one of winking disavowal: he clearly is happy for their votes, but will officially disavow them (he actually prefers the phrase "I disavow," with nothing else in the sentence) in ways the white supremacists apparently take as just window dressing. But Trump has not shown any interest in these groups busting any heads for him.

But if we reach a point where any of these groups, or a new group like them, starts to act in concerted ways to aid the Trump campaign: intimidating voters, vandalizing Clinton headquarters or wholesale trashing yard signs, then we'll have turned an ugly page. They might have some excuse or pretext, such as "fighting back" against the New Black Panthers or another group they call "thugs," but that will just be an excuse. And if Trump ever seems to give such behavior his ambiguous blessing, then it will be a genuine national emergency.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Dear Republicans: You Did This. You Fix It.

Dear Republicans: I know that many of you are upset by Donald Trump's rise. I know that many of you are horrified. But let's be frank. This is your party. You did this. I won't walk through the details. But the thing speaks for itself: the Republican Party planted the seeds for this, cultivated those seeds through campaign season after campaign season, and now they have borne strange fruit.

You did this. You have to fix it.

I've heard some talk from various pundits about what Democrats or liberals should do to stop Trump. Some pundits talk about how we should vote in the Republican primary to shore up this or that anti-Trump. Some people have already begun muttering about how the Democratic nominee will need to use restraint against Trump in the general, about not stooping to his level, all of which is simply an attempt to impose rules to limit how the Democratic nominee campaigns. To all of that I say: no.

The Republicans did this, and the Republicans need to fix it. If you cannot keep Trump from becoming your nominee, we will take things into our own hands by beating him in the general. And don't you dare tell us how to campaign. We will beat Trump by any means required, because the health of our Republic demands it. You don't get to build the monster, lose to the monster, and then tell us all the ways we're not allowed to fight the monster. You beat him yourself, or you let us do it and don't complain about how.

If you can't stop Trump in the primaries, you need to stop giving us advice. If Trump gets to the general election, it's your turn to listen to us. You need to do your duty to America and vote for Hillary Clinton.

You don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, or for Bernie Sanders? I get it; I understand that you're Republicans. In your shoes, I wouldn't want to vote for your party's nominee. But I'm not in your shoes, because my party isn't about to nominate a dangerous and shamefully unqualified demagogue to the highest office in the land. We're deciding between a competent pragmatist and a seasoned idealist. You're about to nominate a race-baiting realtor with florid psychiatric symptoms. Our party doesn't do that. Yours does. There is a price to pay for that.

And don't tell me that Hillary Clinton is just as bad as Donald Trump. You know that is a lie. And lies like that are how your party got so far adrift in the first place. It's time to stop lying to yourselves and to face the real world. There's no place left to hide.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Praying for Nino, and Planning for What's Next

This morning in church I prayed for the soul of Antonin Scalia, and asked for him to receive God's mercy. I disagreed with him sharply during his lifetime, and sometimes judged him harshly, which made prayer all the more incumbent on me. Some of my friends have argued with me about this on social media, taking it as some sign of approval or absolution. Let me be very clear: I believe that Scalia is very much in need of mercy. (I have a beloved aunt, a former Sister of St. Joseph, who passed away a few years ago, and I almost never pray for her, because I strongly doubt God needs me to vouch for her.) I believe, I fear, that Scalia has done things that require God's forgiveness.

But on the other hand, Scalia was a human being with a moral self, capable of both good and evil, and I need to recognize his humanity. Nor is it for me to judge his soul. Scalia was subject to some of the temptations -- a sharp tongue, a weakness for partisan conflict, pride in his intellectual abilities -- that I have wrestled with for many years. And my chief grievance against Justice Scalia in the exercise of his office was that he sometimes failed to respect others' humanity as fully as he ought, that he did not render the compassion or mercy that others were owed. But if those were his failings, they will not be mended by aping him. Dehumanizing Nino Scalia and hardening our hearts against him would mean taking on the worst of his failings and perpetuating them.

I was appalled to see people cheering Scalia's death on the internet. I was never going to be sorry the day he left the Court, but I can't rejoice in the way he left it. I was ashamed of many of my fellow liberals. But I was just as appalled to see conservatives playing partisan games within an hour of the sad news.

I can't imagine a sorrier monument to Scalia's "originalist" approach than to openly defy the plain reading of the Constitution. A President of the United States with 11 months left in his term is President of the United States. Apparently, even those basic facts are unacceptable to the current Republican Party, so we're going to spend the rest of the election year in the Thunderdome.

But I think the Republicans, in their current disarray, just Thunderdomed themselves. One result of McConnell and Cruz's open obstructionism is that the Senate elections just got nationalized. Every Republican senator running for election in a swing state can now be painted as an obstructionist for not giving the President's nominee an up-or-down vote. Just choosing to find fault with a particular nominee, the safe and obvious strategy, has been taken off the table because McConnell gave the game away by announcing that Obama had no right to nominate anyone.

(There's a special circle of political hell for Republican senators who are running for re-election in swing states but who haven't had their primary yet, which is to say all of the swing-state Republicans but Kelly Ayotte. Those senators can be attacked on the right unless they commit to NOT approving ANY nominee, and then attacked in the general for being partisan hacks. Mitch McConnell, political genius, just threw his own senators into that circle of hell.)

Meanwhile, Obama is free to nominate a potential justice he genuinely wants to see on the court. If his pick gets nominated, he wins. If the Republicans block his nominee (or a series of his nominees; he has time to nominate at least three), he can make the Republicans look like the hacks they are. Meanwhile, the stalemated Court won't be able to make any precedent without at least one of the liberal judges agreeing. (The sole exception is the odious Fisher v. Texas case, where the conservatives might overturn affirmative action in college admissions of a 4-3 vote because Justice Kagan has recused herself. Chief Justice Roberts has to ask himself if he's willing to do that, and possibly damage the Court's reputation, with only four votes.)

The biggest surprise in this political chaos is that we're surprised. It's been a long time since a Supreme Court Justice passed away in office. And in many ways, our political elite has begun to presume upon modern medicine and extreme longevity. Antonin Scalia was clearly planning to hang on into his eighties. We now expect Supreme Court Justices to hang on into their eighties if they choose, as if it were simply a matter of choice. When the death of a 79-year-old comes as such a drastic surprise, we all need to recalibrate our response to mortality.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Don't Ever Call the Cops: The Tamir Rice Story

The Tamir Rice story, and the irresponsible decision not to prosecute his killers, is breaking my heart. And while the worst sufferers are Tamir's family, I have found myself thinking, ever since he died, about the poor soul who called 911. That person was just trying to do the right thing, but the positive, neighborly gesture led to disaster. Calling 911 brought the Cleveland Police, and because the police came a child died. Everything would have better if the police had not come.

I wonder about that 911 caller, who did the right thing and will have to wrestle with guilt because in Cleveland that became the wrong thing. The 911 call specifically said that the person in the park was probably a kid and the gun was probably a fake. Those caveats got stripped away, and the police rolled right up on the poor boy, got out of their patrol car car, and immediately shot him dead. Then they stood around let the child bleed to death.

Before we go through the apologists' spin doctoring, let's remember three things:
1. Tamir got shot within two seconds of the police's arrival. They did not give him time to comply with any order. I do not think they gave the boy time even to comprehend their orders.
2. The fake gun was still tucked in Tamir's belt when he was killed. The police never saw it in his hand.
3. Even Tamir had been a grown man with an actual pistol, THAT IS NOT AGAINST THE LAW in Ohio. Ohio, for better or worse, is an open-carry state, which means that people have the legal right to carry a gun openly in parks. The cops shot him dead although there was no crime being committed, and no appearance of a crime being committed.

That is to say, there was no crime being committed until the cops arrived. The police themselves became the menace, not for the first time in Cleveland, destroying the civil peace they were sworn to protect.

And that leads us back to the problem of the 911 caller. Because one of the practical lessons here is: do not call the police. They are too dangerous. What should be the safe and neighborly thing to do has the most gruesome unintended consequences, because the police turned a kid fooling around on a playground into violent death. I'm sure that caller won't be quick to call the cops back to the neighborhood. How could you be?

And this is just one particularly stark and ugly example of the ways that bad cops destroy good cops' ability to do their jobs. Police work depends on neighborhood cooperation. Always has, always will. It's impossible to solve most crimes without neighbors providing tips and serving as witnesses. (The prevalence of CSI-style procedurals on TV is partly about denying this fact. In the real world, solving a felony with DNA evidence alone is rare.) Keeping peace and preventing crime depends on neighbors being willing to call 911. When you teach a neighborhood not to call the cops and not to trust the cops, because the cops themselves have proved themselves untrustworthy, you are making real police work nearly impossible.

It's not justice or peace. The police are sworn to uphold both. By endangering the citizens they are sworn to protect, they not only pervert their sworn charge, but make it impossible for any peace officer to do the job correctly.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Why Not Say It's Racism? The Charleston Massacre

The murder of nine people in Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston has left me sick and stunned, as it has left many of you. And what I needed badly, over the last two days, was national unity. But I didn't get it. Apparently, we're too divided as a nation to band together after a terrorist attack. We're so divided that some of us won't admit that the terrorist had the motives that he clearly proclaimed. Apparently, there are sides to take in everything, even this.

Some people - not just twits and trolls on the Internet but prominent public figures - refuse to admit that the Charleston murder was motivated by race. Or they admit it only reluctantly, after previous evasions. That includes people running for President of the United States. I find that outrageous. And I find it menacing. Why give a terrorist political cover?

The Charleston killer isn't some garden-variety, sends-around-racist-e-mail racist. He's a full-on white supremacist. He publicly displayed a photo of himself wearing the flags of two white-supremacist governments, Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, suggesting he's so racist that he resents blacks being allowed to vote in Africa. He told his roommate he believed in "segregation." He selected a historic black church that had been a center of both the anti-slavery and civil rights movements, and he attacked it on the anniversary of a failed slave uprising led by one of the church's founders. Apparently he wasn't forgiven Mother Emanuel AME for the abolition of slavery. He stood up and made a racist rant before he started shooting. But today, Jeb Bush -- Jeb Bush! -- says that he doesn't know if the killer was racially motivated.

Yes, you do, Jeb. You know. Just like everyone on Fox News knows. Just like Nikki Haley and Lindsay Graham knew yesterday, before they could bring themselves to say the words "hate crime" today, when Haley was talking about how we would "never know" the killer's motivations. You know. Why can't you say it?

Do you need hard-core racists' votes (or hard-core racist viewers) so badly that you're afraid of speaking out any racism, no matter how extreme?

Do you see race in America as an us-vs-them game, in which any acknowledgement of black suffering somehow takes something away from whites?

Do you actually think this murderer is so close to you ideologically that his crimes discredit you? How ideologically close to him ARE you?

Are you actually afraid that taking action against racist violence will mean losing something you want to keep, or that your supporters want to keep?

Are there steps law enforcement could take against this kind of violence that you don't want them to take? Why the hell not?

If those questions seem tough, well, you had a simple question with an obvious answer and you blew it.  When you couldn't or wouldn't admit what was in front of your face, it made me wonder why not. When an extremist commits a crime for obvious racist reasons, refusing to admit that racism was the motive means letting racism itself off the hook. And excusing the ideology means leaving the door open for the next act of ideological terrorism. What I hear you saying is that this crime was awful but that you don't want to prevent the next one. And that scares the bejesus out of me.

cross-posted from and comments welcome at dagblog

Police, Danger, and the Social Contract

I was blogging about the police tonight, and about the responses to protests of police brutality. Then I heard about the shooting of two police officers in New York City,  so the rest of that post (and some of the others I have been working on) will have to wait.

The first thing I want to say is that absolutely nothing justifies this. Nothing justifies the murder. And if the murderer committed his crime in the service of any reasonable cause, he has set back that cause tonight. You don't get justice for Eric Garner, or for anyone else, by vigilante revenge. That only makes the problem worse.

We live in a culture where the police (who face real danger in their work) have been taught -- indeed, actively trained -- to be excessively fearful, to the point where some officers will put citizens' lives and safety at substantial risk rather than face some very small risk themselves. (For example, they might apply a chokehold to a suspect who's already being held on every side by several officers, and who can't free either of his arms. What danger that was meant to eliminate is hard to say.) Basically, the logic is that every possible trace of danger should be eliminated, which is impossible. So the effort to eliminate all danger generally means being extremely aggressive in situations that aren't actually that dangerous.

But that culture of fear is not helped by randomly killing police officers. It's fear that's driving the aggression, and the fear is fed by the potential randomness of the danger. Cops being killed without seeing the danger coming translates, in our current atmosphere, into cops being hyper-aggressive in situations of minimal danger because, "You never know."

Killing two cops in an ambush won't break up the mindset that killed Eric Garner, Killing two cops at random feeds the mindset that killed Eric Garner. When the police have been convinced that they could die at any moment, they take crazy and dangerous steps against people who actually pose no threat to them.

But anyone pointing at this murder as justifying that bad and crazy policing is a mistake. This doesn't justify anything. And the NYPD's aggression on the street will not, cannot, protect them from things like this. Saying they need to get tough with non-violent offenders in misdemeanor arrests because they could be killed in an ambush makes no sense. That strategy creates new problems without solving the old one.

The ugly truth is, police officers (like every other human being) are extremely vulnerable to a surprise ambush with a gun. Two police officers were killed this way in Las Vegas this year, gunned down by anti-government nuts while eating lunch. And obviously, the Tsarnaev brothers ambushed and killed an MIT campus cop last year. The method is the same every time: come up behind a police officer and shoot. The attacks in all three cases came out of the blue, and there was nothing that the officers could have done to protect themselves. It's not a question of police tactics. None of those cops had a chance.

But this is where the current approach to police work, the attempt to eliminate any and all potential danger, breaks down. You can never eliminate all danger. You can never even eliminate all mortal danger. Every police officer -- and every police officer's family -- has to live with that small, terrible chance. (I am a police lieutenant's son myself; I know exactly what this feels like.) There is always a little danger that you can't foresee or protect yourself from. But you definitely can't get rid of that uncontrollable danger by getting extra tough when there is no danger. Someone with a gun could always come up behind you. You can't protect yourself from that by choking an unarmed guy who's selling loosies on the street. That only creates more problems.

Least of all should the Mayor of New York, or other people who have legitimately criticized police tactics, be blamed for a crime against police officers. Police work is too important to be shielded from any criticism, and the difference between good and bad police work is much, much too important for bad cops to get a free pass. When police work becomes so recklessly bad that unarmed civilians are getting killed, when the police have actually become a cause of violence on the street, then the civil authorities have a duty to look into that. They would be derelict if they did NOT investigate.

In fact, the police are safest when they have strong civic oversight. In the end, the police's greatest protection is the social contract, which they are meant to enforce. The public support the police because the police protect them. If they endanger the public instead, the social contract breaks down. If ordinary citizens know there's a legitimate grievance process that works, and that they are safe from needless aggression by the police, the cops are safest and most respected. But when those legitimate outlets do not exist, or break down, then people are wrongly tempted to redress by illegitimate means. A breakdown of the social contract leads to unpredictable violence. And that puts everyone in more danger.

cross-posted from Dagblog

The Fire This Time

There is one truth that we need to face today, after the grand jury's decision in Ferguson. And that truth is simple. No one can live like this.

No one can live with an arrangement where their sons can be killed with impunity. No one can make their peace with that. No one can accept that. No one can live like this.

You cannot tell someone, "Look, some things are better for you than they have been. And other things are not so bad. Your son may go out for a walk one day and never come home, because he has been shot in the street: even if he is unarmed, even if he is no danger. But other than that one thing life is good." You cannot say that. And that is why people try to say it without putting it in exactly those words. But that is not something you can ask of anyone.

Calling for peace in the aftermath is an insult. There is no peace. If some people are allowed to be shot dead and others are allowed to get away with that, then there is no peace. There is no public safety, because not all of the public are safe. The old saying "No justice, no peace," is relevant here, but it's even starker than that. No peace, no peace.

Pretending that this is not about race does not help. No one would defend a Darren Wilson if they did not think it was about race, because no one would defend Darren Wilson if they really thought he was equally likely to kill their own son or grandson or nephew. If it weren't about race, Darren Wilson would already be under the jail. I do not want to live in a country where the police shoot unarmed teenagers dead. That they only kill unarmed teenagers from a specific ethnic group does not make it better. No one can live like this.

Rationalizing every crime, blaming the victim, does not help. It adds insult to injury. Unarmed teenagers can be shot dead in the street, and the killer will get away with it. Then, to comfort themselves, many people will defame the murdered boy. That is an act of aggression. Killing someone and then claiming it was their own fault does not make it better. It makes it worse. No one can live with that.

Forget the fire next time. Think about the fire this time. No one can live with a system that murders their sons without bothering much for a reason. No one can accept a system that allows that. There can be no peace, no justice, in our country unless that peace and justice extends to all alike. Economic inequality is cruel. Racial inequality is unjust. But inequality in matters of life and death is unbearable. No one will bear it, because no one can. Darren Wilson didn't just kill one unarmed man. He put yet another bullet in the body of the American Way.

cross-posted (and comments welcome) at Dagblog

Religious Liberty vs. Hobby Lobby

Let's start with one thing. It is not acceptable for my boss to make my religious decisions. It is not acceptable for your boss to make your religious decisions, or for somebody else's boss to make religious decisions for them. Your religious freedom is yours, alone. It does not belong to your employer, to your landlord, or to anybody else. The deepest stupidity of the inane Hobby Lobby decision is that it uses religious freedom to let your boss take away your religious freedom. That is not acceptable. And it is not sustainable. Five allegedly rational Supreme Court justices have just opened the door to vicious religious conflict. Because letting your boss make your religious decisions is not acceptable, and over the long run people will not accept it.

I will admit that the Supreme Court and I come at First Amendment questions from different directions (although with a shared commitment to the First Amendment's value). They look back at it from the present day, viewing the Constitution as a point of intellectual origin. They understand its context and immediate antecedents, but their historical narrative is about the creation of the Constitution and the past two centuries of its interpretation. My scholarly work forces me to look forward to the Constitution. The writers and books I study are from an earlier period, inhabiting a world in which the Constitution is not yet imaginable. So I have gradually come to see the Constitution in terms of what went before, to see it as a set of codified solutions to particularly ugly historical problems. I don't have to imagine where we would be without Constitution or the Bill of Rights, because I have all too clear a picture of what the world without them was like.

The 16th and 17th centuries were periods of ferocious religious warfare, complete with terrorism, persecution, assassination, torture, inquisitions, and massacres of civilians. I use none of those terms figuratively. Kings were stabbed to death by religious fanatics. Religious leaders were burned alive in the public square. Conspirators plotted to blow up government buildings, to overthrow regimes. Women and children were beaten to death by mobs of their own neighbors. All of this was done by Christians to other Christians, and no denomination's hands were clean. If you look back at this history hoping to find that your own church behaved like the good guys, you will be sorely disappointed. Every existing Christian group played both the villain and the victim, more than once.

The hundred years or so before the Constitutional Convention saw the European religious conflicts modulate somewhat, so that religion became one volatile and dangerous wild card in larger games of international conflict and domestic factionalism. But religious intolerance and aggression did not go away. The settlement of the Thirteen Colonies was partly driven by the need to escape various forms of sectarian prosecution. And while the wars of religion were no longer the main show, they were certainly not gone. The last armed revolt aimed at putting a Roman Catholic on the English throne was in 1745. Benjamin Franklin was 39 years old at the time.

When I hear 21st-century American Christians complain about being persecuted for their beliefs, I am caught between laughter and disgust. Those people have no idea what real persecution is. And the danger to Christians has never been the secular state. The greatest danger to Christians; religious freedom is always other Christians. Secular government was devised to protect Christians from one another, and it is the only thing that has been shown to work.

The First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion, and prohibits the establishment of any favored religion. The current religious right loves one clause and hates the second. They want freedom of exercise. They hate that the Establishment clause enforces a level playing field, and prevents one religious group's exercise from infringing upon others. Enormous bitterness is directed toward Jefferson's phrase "separation of Church and State," with endless tedious reminders that Jefferson's phrase is not in the First Amendment per se (but only a clear record of, ahem, original intention). But the fact is, you can't have one without the other. Religious freedom is only possible if the officially-secular state enforces a neutral playing field.

If we allow various Christian groups (or hypothetically other groups, although only Christians have that kind of political muscle in the United States) to use political or economic power to push their version of Christianity on others, the live-and-let-live "free exercise" arrangement falls apart. And then push comes to shove.

If certain parties are allowed to exercise their religious rights so vigorously that other people aren't free to make their own religious decisions, then no one can afford religious tolerance anymore. If my neighbor is permitted to impose his religion on me, then my only recourse is to drive everyone whose religion I disagree with out of the neighborhood. If the principal of the public elementary school has religious freedom to proselytize my (hypothetical) children, then I need to discriminate against certain potential principals on religious grounds, eliminating people whose beliefs I don't share. If a Mormon governor is liable to ban coffee shops, then I can no longer vote for a Mormon candidate. If people are using business to push religion, I can no longer do business with people of incompatible religions. That's a very bad outcome, but it's also the inevitable outcome.

If the government does not act as a referee, religious toleration becomes impossible, unworkable. If individuals are allowed to use whatever leverage they happen to have to coerce their neighbors or employees or tenants into conforming with their own religious beliefs, what you create is a competition in which people are forced to keep amassing more and more coercive muscle. The only way to keep your neighbors from jamming their religion down your throat is to organize some coreligionists and jam your religion down the neighbors' throats. That turns into persecute or be persecuted: a swift, ugly, and distinctly ungodly cycle.

What five of the Supreme Court justices have decided in Hobby Lobby is that religious coercion by non-government agents is actually a guaranteed right, and that the government cannot step in to prevent it because that would limit the coercive party's right to free exercise. That is a mind-bogglingly stupid position. And it ultimately leads back to the bad old days of sectarian infighting, where the only way to protect your own religious liberty was to trample everybody else's. I don't want any part of a country like that. I been there before.

cross-posted from Dagblog