Month: July 2018

QOTD: an anonymous European official

by digby

Welcome to our world:

“When you’re talking to Mattis it’s a normal conversation and you imagine for a moment you’re dealing with a normal administration,” a senior European official told us. “But then you look at Trump’s Twitter feed and you realize none of it matters.”

It’s a problem.

The ballad of Alan Dershowitz

by digby

two peas in a pod

My Salon column today about the ballad of Alan Dersowitz:

If you made the wise decision to stay off the internet over the July 4 break, you may not have heard about the saga of Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz and the supposed social ostracism during his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard this summer. Evidently, some people with whom he usually associates find his defenses of Donald Trump to be off-putting, and they don’t want to invite him to their parties.

Dershowitz had complained about being persona non grata last summer too but this year decided to write an op-ed in the Hill about it, calling it a form of McCarthyism. This prompted the publishing of three prominent New York Times articles and a review of his new book (arguing against the impeachment of Donald Trump), which recapitulated the ongoing soap opera as well. Since a central hallmark of the Trump era is famous people whining in public about being treated unfairly, this is only notable for the fact that the media seems to be obsessed with the story. Also, the man is selling a book. (Dershowitz is scheduled to visit “Salon Talks” on Monday for a conversation with Andrew O’Hehir and D. Watkins.)

Nonetheless, there are some good reasons to take a closer look at why some former friends might be angry with Dershowitz. Despite his claims of oppression, one would think that the self-described champion of civil liberties would respect the concept of freedom of association, which is generally considered to be the natural right of people to gather together and “collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend their collective or shared ideas.” These people on Martha’s Vineyard don’t want to socialize with someone who claims that Donald Trump has unlimited power over the Department of Justice and is personally above the law. It’s called shunning, and it is a very old tradition.

Dershowitz explains his position on Trump as a matter of principle, but like any good lawyer (and he is among the best) he summons various arguments, depending on the situation, to buttress his case. For instance, when he’s defending Trump against charges of collusion, he often claims that he’s unbiased by suggesting that while Hillary Clinton “colluded” with the DNC to unfairly rig the Democratic primary, he doesn’t believe she committed a crime either. The Fox News audience undoubtedly appreciates the cunning of that argument, but a troll is a troll and everyone knows it when they see it.

Whether he’s saying that Trump can’t be held responsible for collusion because no such specific statute exists, that a president cannot obstruct justice because he has the power to hire and fire any federal employee at will or that the pardon power could legally be used to cover up a murder, the sum of his arguments leads to the obvious conclusion that Dershowitz believes the president of the United States has imperial powers.

I take him at his word that he believes this about all presidents. But the liberal intelligentsia with whom he likes to pal around can be forgiven for finding his full-throated defense of the unfettered power of the presidency rather alarming when it’s on behalf of a man who openly threatens the rule of law, the judiciary, political opposition, immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans — actually anyone who opposes him.

Perhaps they didn’t see the danger in their friend’s academic arguments before, but seeing him make one like this specifically on behalf of Donald Trump may have focused their minds:

Alan Dershowitz to @GStephanopoulos: “You cannot question a president’s motives when the president acts. If a president pardons, that’s it. If a president fires, that’s it. You can’t go beyond an act and get into his motive or into his intent.” #ThisWeek pic.twitter.com/8x6F3KjVM6

— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) July 8, 2018

I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t make any legal or constitutional arguments against Dershowitz’s position. Others have made them very thoroughly. But as a citizen who believes strongly in civil liberties, I can say that I find his argument defies common sense. If the president is exempt from the laws of the land simply because he is at the top of the organizational chart of the Department of Justice, then our entire understanding of our founding principles are a joke.

But then, this isn’t the first time I’ve found Dershowitz’s arguments to be too clever by half. After 9/11 a lot of people lost their ethical moorings, and the government itself decided that it needed to abrogate the taboo against torture, so lawyers at the Department of Justice cooked up a secret opinion to legalize it. We know what happened after that.

Dershowitz was upfront about his defense of torture but separated himself from the acts perpetrated by the Bush administration by arguing that what really matters is the process by which it should be done. He agreed that the practice was immoral, but since it might be necessary in a “ticking bomb” scenario (in which he claimed the suspect is “not likely to provide information unless we use certain extreme measures”), we should devise a bureaucratic system where top levels of the government sign off and no one is hypocritical about it, which he seemed to think was the fundamental issue.

The central principle involved in that argument was that it’s important to have legal procedures in place to protect government officials when they perform immoral acts. Dershowitz stuck to the argument even in the face of a massive amount of evidence that torture doesn’t work, insisting that since people will do it no matter what, it was necessary to have a legal method of carrying it out.

In another example, in the wake of the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, Dershowitz told Fox News:

Black Lives Matter is endangering the fairness of our legal system. Because they’re rooting for outcomes based on race.

First, that simply isn’t true. They’re rooting for outcomes based upon justice for young, unarmed black people who are shot dead by police. The words “unarmed” and “shot dead” should be enough to give any civil libertarian pause, and the fact that so many of the victims are young black men indicts the system on a whole other level. Apparently Dershowitz thinks that America is more threatened by Black Lives Matter not trusting the outcomes of the judicial system. Where does he suppose such mistrust might have come from?

If you feel that Dershowitz might be missing the forest for the trees in these arguments, you aren’t alone. He advocates for a position, but the position only makes sense in an abstract academic debate. In the real world, he is advocating for torture, condemning activists for protesting the rampant killing of young unarmed black men and arguing that the presidency is an office of unfettered power.

There’s a lot more of this stuff, cloaked in the mantle of civil liberties, that makes less and less sense the closer you look at it. Defending Donald Trump is another example of a civil liberties philosophy devoid of morality or sound judgement.

The good news for Dershowitz is that there is one very important person who loves to spend time with him:

Alan Dershowitz arrived at the White House this week expecting to discuss the Middle East. Before long, the president had invited him to an intimate dinner of a ravioli appetizer, guinea hen entree, and, for dessert, fruit compote.

One hopes he remembered to let Trump have two scoops.

The rabbit hole is a cave
by Tom Sullivan

A panoramic view over the southernmost districts of Helsinki from Hotel Torni. Photo by KFP via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

“U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials” atop a story in yesterday’s New York Times was eye-catching for a several reasons. First, it is lousy public health policy driven more by concern for infant formula manufacturers than for infants. Second, at the May meeting in Geneva the U.S. threatened Ecuador with trade sanctions and withdrawal of military aid if it introduced the resolution promoting breast-feeding.

“We were shocked because we didn’t understand how such a small matter like breast-feeding could provoke such a dramatic response,” an unnamed Ecuadorian official told the Times.

The Times reports the U.S. recently tried unsuccessfully to stop a World Health Organization initiative to loosen patent laws to make life-saving drugs more widely available in develping countries. Washington sides with the pharmaceutical industry in opposing such efforts, and has a history of prioritizing corporate profits over health.

Finally, after “at least a dozen” countries backed away for fear of U.S. retaliation in what one advocate called “tantamount to blackmail,” the United States relented.

The Times report adds:

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

An unidentified Russian delegate commenting on the matter said, ““We’re not trying to be a hero here, but we feel that it is wrong when a big country tries to push around some very small countries, especially on an issue that is really important for the rest of the world.”

Russia for the PR win. And a very unsettling reversal after the Trump administration’s heavy handedness. Why?

Jonathan Chait wonders aloud about Donald Trump’s relationship to Russia. To-date we have seen series of disconnected episodes with plausibly innocent explanations. “What if we’re still standing closer to the mouth of the cave than the end?” he asks. “Suppose we are currently making the same mistake we made at the outset of this drama — suppose the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper.” If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, he writes, it is one with origins in intelligence services and in the corridors of power rather than in chat rooms far from them.

Chait retraces a familiar ground in the investigation into Russian hacking of the 2016 election: the Steele dossier, Trump’s July 2013 visit to Moscow, the Russians’ history of developing foreign “assets,” Paul Manafort’s Russian debts and other Trump campaign officials’ ties to Russia, and notably, then–CIA director John Brennan’s 2016 congressional testimony in which he hinted some Americans may have betrayed their country.

Meanwhile, the sitting president continues efforts that undermine western alliances, threatening NATO and the G7 as he targets immigrants xenophobic at home:

Even though the 2018 version of Trump is more independent and authentic, he still has advisers pushing for and designing the thrusts of Trumpian populism. Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross are steering him toward a trade war; Stephen Miller, John Kelly, and Jeff Sessions have encouraged his immigration restrictionism. But who is bending the president’s ear to split the Western alliance and placate Russia?

Who indeed? The sitting president increasingly looks like a man with something to hide as well as an accessory after the fact.

And if you’re Putin, embarking upon a coveted summit with the most Russophilic president since World War II, who is taking a crowbar to the alliance of your enemies, why wouldn’t you help him in 2018 and 2020? Ever since the fall of 2016, when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell privately turned down an Obama-administration proposal for a bipartisan warning to Russia not to interfere in the election, the underlying dynamic has been set: Most Republicans would rather win an election with Putin’s help than lose one without it. The Democrats, brimming with rage, threaten to investigate Russian activity if they win a chamber of Congress this November. For Putin to redouble his attack — by hacking into voting machines or some other method — would be both strategic and in keeping with his personality. Why stop now?

Meanwhile, the White House has eliminated its top cybersecurity position. That might simply reflect a Republican bias against bureaucratic expertise. But it might also be just what it looks like: The cop on the beat is being fired because his boss is in cahoots with the crooks.

It is a long, but worthwhile review of what we know. But there is more to add to Chait’s narrative.

The Washington Post notes an unusual blog post last week from national security blogger Marcy Wheeler, a.k.a., emptywheel. Wheeler confessed to violating a cardinal rule of journalism. She reported a source to the FBI last year:

Her blog post centers on a text message she says she got from the source on Nov. 9, 2016 — about 14 hours after the polls closed — predicting that Michael Flynn, who would be Trump’s appointee for national security adviser, would be meeting with “Team Al-Assad” within 48 hours. Russia has been perhaps the Assad regime’s staunchest ally.

As she noted: “The substance of the text — that the Trump team started focusing on Syria right after the election — has been corroborated and tied to their discussions with Russia at least twice since then.”

Flynn has since pleaded to one count of lying to the FBI.

In addition to the knowledge of her source’s inside information, Wheeler said, she had reason to believe that the source was involved with efforts to compromise her website and other communications. And perhaps most important, that he was involved in cyberattacks — past and future — that had done and could do real harm to innocent people.

Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, told the Post Wheeler’s move made his jaw drop, “She would not do this on a whim.” Drezner doesn’t know her, but I do. No, she wouldn’t.

So pay close attention to the outcome of the upcoming U.S.-Russia summit in Helsinki. Should the would-be leader of the free world declare the U.S. a Russian satellite, it will take more than Thai SEALs to extract us from that cave.

* * * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Will he lose it in Helsinki?

by digby

I can’t believe I’m quoting George Will but his take on the upcoming summit in light of Trump’s performance in North Korea is worth noting:

The most dangerous moment of the Trump presidency will arrive when he, who is constantly gnawed by insecurities and the fear of not seeming what he is not (“strong”), realizes how weak and childish he seems to all who cast a cool eye on Singapore’s aftermath. The danger is of him lashing out in wounded vanity.

Meanwhile, this innocent abroad is strutting toward a meeting with the cold-eyed Russian who is continuing to dismantle one of Europe’s largest nations, Ukraine. He is probably looking ahead to ratcheting up pressure on one of three small nations, Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia, each a member of the NATO alliance that, for the first time in its 69 years, is dealing with a U.S. president who evinces no admiration for what it has accomplished or any understanding of its revived importance as the hard man in Moscow, who can sniff softness, relishes what Singapore revealed.

I think Trump lashing out in wounded vanity is a danger, of course. We all wonder what happens on the day Trump realizes he’s been played. But I’m beginning to wonder if that will ever happen. So far, it seems that Trump is living in his own bubble in which everything he does is brilliant, genius, unprecedented. In his mind (or perhaps just in his sales strategy) he cannot lose.

I agree that he’s an insecure man who is deeply afraid of being seen as weak. But his way of dealing with that is to simply assert strongly that he isn’t. Sure he’s constantly whining like a six year old that everything is “unfair” and he casts blame constantly. But I don’t see evidence that he has the guts to actually turn on someone he sees as stronger than he is and truly test his power that way. Bullies don’t go after people who are bigger than the are.

I’d guess the most likely outcome of the next two weeks will be Trump pounding on the Europeans whom he sees as his vassals and kissing up to Putin whom he sees … differently.(Blackmailer?, Co-conspirator? Superior? Hero? All of the above?)

Whatever comes of the summit, he will just spin as a great victory for America and his followers will clap like the trained seals they are.

But sure, there’s always the chance that he’s going to test his power in a truly dangerous way. I think the whole world is holding its breath, hoping against hope that day doesn’t come.

.

They’re getting the country they want


by digby

I guess this is the one area in which Trump is indeed being a classic isolationist:

ABC news reports:

In 2017, the U.S. resettled 33,000 refugees, a 66 percent drop from the 97,000 individuals it resettled in 2016. Non-U.S. countries resettled 69,000 refugees in the same year.

The study, which drew on data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and U.S. State Department data, charted the steep decline in resettlement following the Trump administration’s historically low cap of 50,000 refugees for the 2017 fiscal year.

In September, the administration announced it would lower the cap further to 45,000 refugees for this year. And, with three months left to the 2018 fiscal year, resettlement is unlikely to approach that ceiling; the U.S. has currently admitted just over 16,000 refugees.

Andrew Schoenholtz, a Georgetown law professor and Director of the Human Rights Institute and Center for Applied Legal Studies, told ABC News that members of the Trump cabinet, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his staff, have deliberately slowed the refugee vetting process in order to decrease intake.

“Even though they committed to 45,000, it’s been very clear all along that Steve Miller, who is one of Sessions’ people, wanted to have 20,000 or 22,000,” Schoenholtz said. “They’ve made the system as slow as it could possibly be.”

The number of Muslim refugees admitted to the U.S. has dropped substantially more than the number of refugees from other religious denominations. The decrease follows several changes to the U.S. immigration system, including a ban restricting travel from several majority-Muslim countries that was recently upheld by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii.

Trump and his henchmen are horrible, cruel people. The US is the richest country on earth and can easily absorb a hundred thousand refugees a year or more. There’s room, there’s a thriving economy and we need new people. And that’s not to mention the fact that our policies are at least partially responsible for the fact that many of these people are refugees in the first place. The fact that we refuse to accept that climate change is real and commit to doing anything about it is going to create millions more as people are on the move to survive famine, wars and political displacement as a result.

But if what you wanted was an isolationism that says fuck everyone but Trump voters (who won’t benefit from any of this either) then you can’t be too unhappy with Trump’s policies. Sure, hes building up the military and strong-arming other country’s governments with threats unless they pay him protection money and do exactly what he says, so the idea that he is “withdrawing” from the world is incorrect.

But he is closing America’s doors to foreigners and is working as hard as he can deport as many who are already here as he can. He’s making America white again.
.

Tilting at windmills in the White House

by digby

During their photo-op Trump blathered away about all the good news (whatever lies he decided to spew forth today). During that rambling idiotic Trump drool, Trump began sort of talking about his “trade tariff” threats. Prime Minister Rutte was visibly frustrated, though he hid it behind an almost maniacal smile at how cavalier Trump was being about the sole reason these two men were in the same room taking pictures.

Trump: “The EU… If we do work it out, that will be positive. And if we don’t, it will be positive also, because –

Rutte: “No.

Trump: —just think about those cars that pour in here.
Rutte: It’s not positive. We have to work something out.

Prime Minister Rutte is very diplomatic about this all, smiling and laughing, and definitely dying a little inside. He follows up Trump’s embarrassing display of utter stupidity by giving Trump a primer on what a world leader’s actual job description is supposed to be.

Rutte: Can I add, the relationship to the Netherlands — it is over 400 years old. We are allies. Working closely together. Our talks today will no doubt concentrate on jobs and security. Because the President and I are convinced that as world leaders our prime task is essentially keep our countries safe, and stable; and the economy which is providing jobs and future growth for our people. And there are so many opportunities between the United States and the Netherlands both in the area of security and as well as the area of having more jobs and more trade…

He also reminds Trump that Netherlands’ investments in the United States equals jobs. You can see how frustrating this must be at the very end of the clip as Prime Minister Rutte is prompted to give his handshake to Trump and he quickly wants to leave.

Here’s the video. I got the sense that Trump was distracted and of course, he wouldn’t really understand any of that. The description of Rutte’s strained smiling and laughing is an understatement.

.

Steve Bannon: Just another right wing snowflake

by digby

You will note that Bannon is not reported to have told the bookstore owner not to do it. Was he hiding in the stacks behind the collected works of Dinesh D’souza until the scary lady left?

.

“America First” means, “do what we say or else”

by digby

This story encapsulates everything horrible about the Trump administration’s approach to the world.

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]

The showdown over the issue was recounted by more than a dozen participants from several countries, many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from the United States.

Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.

“We were astonished, appalled and also saddened,” said Patti Rundall, the policy director of the British advocacy group Baby Milk Action, who has attended meetings of the assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, since the late 1980s.

“What happened was tantamount to blackmail, with the U.S. holding the world hostage and trying to overturn nearly 40 years of consensus on best way to protect infant and young child health,” she said.

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

Jesus. Can they be any more transparent?

For people who thought he was going to be an isolationist and withdraw behind walls, this should come as a wake up call. Trump is a bully, not a peacenik. And that is obvious after observing him for more than five minutes.

The intensity of the administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported W.H.O.’s longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding.

During the deliberations, some American delegates even suggested the United States might cut its contribution the W.H.O., several negotiators said. Washington is the single largest contributor to the health organization, providing $845 million, or roughly 15 percent of its budget, last year.

The confrontation was the latest example of the Trump administration siding with corporate interests on numerous public health and environmental issues.

In talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Americans have been pushing for language that would limit the ability of Canada, Mexico and the United States to put warning labels on junk food and sugary beverages, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.

During the same Geneva meeting where the breast-feeding resolution was debated, the United States succeeded in removing statements supporting soda taxes from a document that advises countries grappling with soaring rates of obesity.

The Americans also sought, unsuccessfully, to thwart a W.H.O. effort aimed at helping poor countries obtain access to lifesaving medicines. Washington, supporting the pharmaceutical industry, has long resisted calls to modify patent laws as a way of increasing drug availability in the developing world, but health advocates say the Trump administration has ratcheted up its opposition to such efforts.

The delegation’s actions in Geneva are in keeping with the tactics of an administration that has been upending alliances and long-established practices across a range of multilateral organizations, from the Paris climate accord to the Iran nuclear deal to Nafta.

Ilona Kickbusch, director of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, said there was a growing fear that the Trump administration could cause lasting damage to international health institutions like the W.H.O. that have been vital in containing epidemics like Ebola and the rising death toll from diabetes and cardiovascular disease in the developing world.

“It’s making everyone very nervous, because if you can’t agree on health multilateralism, what kind of multilateralism can you agree on?” Ms. Kickbusch asked.

Trump has decided to blow up every institution that was built before he became president because he’s too goddamn dumb to understand anything but blowing things up. He wants to pal around with fellow autocratic oligarchs so they can split up the spoils.

He will, of course, demand the largest share so I guess we should all be waving the flag and saying hurrah.

hurrah

.

Devin Nunes latest adventure

by digby

Timothy Snyder has dubbed this sort of thing “schizo-facism” (aka “I know you are but what am I politics.) It’ absurd — but what isn’t these days?

California Republican Devin Nunes is doubling down on efforts to go after the people who investigated Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia in the 2016 campaign, the Washington Times reports.

As head of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Nunes wants to target the people who were involved in the Steele Dossier which exposed Trump’s dealings with Russian intelligence and helped lead to the revelation that Donald Trump Jr. colluded with Russian intelligence agents to try to get dirt on Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Nunes is asking two other committees in the Republican-lead congress to call Obama administration officials, FBI agents and outside political activists to offer public testimony. He ha a list of 42 people including FBI agents, Justice Department and State Department officials and anti-Trump activists with whom they communicated.

Among the people the Times says Nunes wants to target are Glenn Simpson, who founded Fusion GPS, the firm that wrote the bombshell Steele dossier.

He also wants to investigate Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager who is now a CNN analyst. Mook was one of the first Clinton allies to blame Russia as behind the hacking of Democratic Party computers.

Honestly, if the Republicans hold the House in November I will not be surprised to see public hearings on this. They will lose all restraint — and they don’t have much to begin with.

.

The punishment is the message
by Tom Sullivan

Perhaps it was Chris Hayes’s interview Tuesday with Kevin Chmielewski that brought home how devout Donald Trump’s followers are. The former Scott Pruitt deputy chief of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency was forced out after telling CNN Pruitt kept secret calendars and schedules to hide certain meetings from the public. From falsifying his calendar to Pruitt using public funds for hotel rooms for the inauguration, first-class travel, a trip to Morocco, to using government resources to find his wife a job, and more, Chmielewski told Hayes he couldn’t take it anymore:

CHMIELEWSKI: So I’ll make it even easier than that. I’ve basically lost my whole career something that I’ve worked 20 years for. I was one of the President’s first advanced guys. I just couldn’t put up with it anymore. I love this administration, I love the President but Scott Pruitt, I mean everything I was – everything I witness I couldn’t be a part of anymore. I mean, this is just one of dozens and dozens of things that he did that I just did not feel comfortable. Not comfortable, I mean it was just downright wrong.

But the sitting president, that Gordian knot of moral and ethical failings? Kevin Chmielewski is still a committed believer. Which is the phrase Cult 45 is now, as Cokie says, “out there.”

This Trump policy change may have won the trifecta of mean-spiritedness, injustice and stupidity.
— Bill Kristol, commenting on the Army discharging dozens of immigrant recruits and reservists

What has establishment conservatives such as Kristol aghast is that mean-spiritedness, injustice and stupidity is the point. It is why the Chmielewskis support the reality show president.

We have a “nationwide emotional health crisis,” laments writer, pastor and activist John Pavlovitz (A Bigger Table). Trump supporters are in it for spite:

That is all that matters to them.
It’s the reason they voted the way they did.
It’s the reason their support is steadfast through affairs and cabinet implosions and human rights disasters and wanton ignorance.
It’s the reason they will keep themselves tethered to him even if he is proven to have leveraged our very nation with the Russian government.

The story, they say, is that Trump supporters see his Presidency as a big F*ck You to his predecessor, to the identity politics that they feel targeted them, and to an ever-diversifying world that they see as a threat. They want someone to stick it to the world on their behalf and this President does that.

“We’re voting with our middle finger” is how a used-car dealer from Greenville, SC described his support for Trump ahead of the 2016 Republican primary there, although the target of his ire likely included the GOP establishment. But the spite didn’t start and won’t end with Donald Trump. A friend who has electioneered in Greenville said years ago he often could spot Republican voters outside the polls by their sour looks. “They’re not coming to vote,” he says. “They’re coming to f*ck someone!”

Many are authoritarians, the “single statistically significant variable [that] predicts whether a voter supports Trump,” according to researcher Matthew MacWilliams. But a predisposition towards authoritarianism is often latent, psychologist Karen Stenner believes. So why is it expressed now? The director of Insight-Analytics explained to Pacific Standard:

The conditions that significantly activate authoritarians, and greatly exacerbate the expression of their authoritarianism in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors, are what I call “normative threats,” (which are) threats to “oneness and sameness.” In diverse, complex, modern societies not sharing a single racial/ethnic identity, the things that make “us” an “us”—that make us one and the same—are common authority, and shared values.

So the classic conditions that typically activate and aggravate authoritarians—rendering them more racially, morally, and politically intolerant—tend to be perceived loss of respect for/confidence in/obedience to leaders, authorities and institutions, or perceived value conflict and loss of societal consensus/shared beliefs, and/or erosion of racial/cultural/group identity. This is sometimes expressed as a loss of “who we are”/”our way of life.”

Conditions for activating latent authoritarianism may be real or merely perceived. Data supporting the notion that economic insecurity is a trigger, Stenner believes, is “weak and inconsistent.”

Political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler (Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, 2009) found:

… the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which “activated” authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

Making Donald Trump (to borrow a phrase he’s fond of) a “central casting” strongman. A TV strongman only, but a reasonable enough facsimile to play well in Great Falls, MT. And Washington Township, MI. And Moon Township, PA.

So how to dial it back, especially since, once activated, authoritarian fervor will likely persist beyond the current presidential term? Stenner suggests, “Working across the aisle, less demonization and greater civility in public discourse would be a really big help, as would voluntary commitment to more restrained and temperate coverage, in both traditional and social media, of all of the above.” But since patronizing the kind of intolerable behavior Chmielewski witnessed and thousands of immigrant families on the southern border have experienced firsthand seems not only ineffective, but naive. In a 2008 TED Talk, Stenner’s colleague, Jonathan Haidt, pointed to another way to rein it in.

The psychology game Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter used to study the effects of “altruistic punishment” on human cooperation invites subjects to contribute a portion of money they’re given to common pot. After each round, the experimenter doubles what is in the pot and distributes it evenly to the players:

And what happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative — and this is all played anonymously. On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. But they quickly see, “You know what, other people aren’t doing so much though. I don’t want to be a sucker. I’m not going to cooperate.” And so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good, down to close to zero.

But then — and here’s the trick — Fehr and Gachter said, on the seventh round, they told people, “You know what? New rule. If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren’t contributing, you can do that.” And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up. It shoots up and it keeps going up. There’s a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. It’s not enough to just appeal to people’s good motives. It really helps to have some sort of punishment. Even if it’s just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they’re in large groups, to cooperate. There’s even some recent research suggesting that religion — priming God, making people think about God — often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior.

Punishment is not a tool the left tends to deploy except in boycotts and variants such as Sleeping Giants. But considering the impact of impromptu protests of Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielsen, it might be time to. The advice from California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters to “create a crowd, and you push back on them” in public might be cruder than needed. I’d prefer the Stephen-King creepiness of entire restaurants going silent. Still, a little scorn, exclusion and rejection, writes Jennifer Rubin, “is not altogether a bad thing to show those who think they’re exempt from personal responsibility” for their actions. Shame and shunning may be as quaint as Alberto Gonzales thinks the Geneva Conventions, but they clearly bite. Ask Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Ed Kilgore explains:

It’s probable that most Americans have only heard of Dershowitz because of his involvement in the legal supernova of the O.J. Simpson case. But still, he has lent his mostly borrowed celebrity to an extremely high-profile habit of defending Donald Trump’s efforts to evade the attentions of Robert Mueller. And it’s his background as a mostly liberal commentator, not his reputation for legal brilliance, that has made him a go-to figure for cable-TV bookers seeking a dependably pro-Trump voice.

So you’d think Dershowitz would be able to take some blowback from former political allies in stride. But no: In an op-ed for the Hill last week, he publicly whined about his terrible persecution by denizens of Martha’s Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod where many rich and famous people (including Dershowitz) spend large portions of every summer, saying he had been subjected to “shunning” from “old friends” who are “trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard.”

Dershowitz compared the shunning to McCarthyism, but he clearly got the message. Jack Holmes of Esquire quipped, “But did you hear that Alan Dershowitz has been reduced to drinking rosé alone?”

Something must be done to stuff this authoritarian genie back into its bottle. And it cannot wait until November 2018 or 2020. A live experiment in whether shame and shunning has any lasting effect is worth trying. But it might be more effective if progressives can refrain from leftsplaining it to the subjects of the shunning. The punishment is the message. The message is not the punishment.

* * * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.