Month: October 2018

What’s with the right wing sore winner syndrome?

by digby

Here is one thing I don’t understand: why is the MAGA crowd always in a perpetual state of anger even after they win. Trump gets elected, they stayed angry. They hold all levers of power in dc, still angry. They win tax vote, still angry. They win kavanaugh, still angry.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 6, 2018

In response to that, I’m re-upping this piece I wrote shortly after the election that I think helps to explain it. Or, at least, analyze it. I can’t say that I truly understand what makes thee people tick, other than a propensity for cruelty, paranoia and a deep need for dominance.

Anyway …

Thursday, November 17, 2016

We must be avowedly with them

by digby

As I have many times before, I wrote about the right’s strange “winner” psychology for Salon today:

It’s not surprising that the election of Donald Trump would cause an upheaval in civil society. The differences between the two visions of America that were presented in this campaign couldn’t be more stark, and it’s inevitable that they would play out beyond the political system.

Much of the unrest has taken the form of protest marches and school walkouts on the left while the right is more inclined to drunken hooliganism, flying the Confederate flag and the like. This is America. We have free speech and a right to assemble, and regardless of how we feel about the “message” being sent by the other side, they have a right to say it.

But there have also been many reports of anonymous defacing of property with white power slogans and other racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic phrases. And there are now hundreds of stories of individual acts of bullying and even hate crimes coming from people who call themselves Trump supporters, aimed at fellow Americans they see as their enemies.

We could see this in the Trump rallies, of course. They bristled with resentment and barely repressed violence. And no one can possibly argue that the candidate didn’t use those dark emotions to motivate his followers. In the “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, Trump admitted that he did that consciously. When Stahl pointed out that people are scared, Trump had to be coaxed to say this:

Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.

Has any president-elect ever been asked to reassure the American people that they needn’t be afraid of him and his followers? It’s astonishing. Trump’s lack of understanding about why they are afraid is even more so. He seems to think people are soothed by him saying “don’t be afraid” followed by “we’re going bring our country back,” as if that were a threat. And that’s exactly what scares them. It’s clear he wants to go back to a time when women, people of color, immigrants and minority religions were second-class citizens. They are terrified of what Trump has promised to do to deliver that lost world back to a swath of America that seems to hate them.

Trump outfoxed the system and won the whole thing without even getting a majority. He heads an undivided government and has the chance to leave a mark on the country for generations with at least one appointment to the Supreme Court. He has the power to enact his entire agenda with very little institutional resistance. And yet his followers are still filled with outrage and frustration, lashing out at the reeling and defeated left.

This incident in Brooklyn over the weekend illustrates the phenomenon. Two women were in a restaurant bemoaning the election of Donald Trump when a man and his wife sat down next to them and became incensed about what the women were saying. The manager moved the couple to a different table and gave them their meal without charge to calm them down, but after leaving the restaurant the man stormed back in and punched one of the women in the face. He told the manager he wanted to kill her. (Fortunately, the woman was not seriously injured.)

This is just one random incident but it raises the question: who gets that mad when they’ve won? It’s not as if those women were rubbing his nose in defeat. Why would something so ordinary as complaining about the election cause a man to hit a a stranger, a woman, in the face?

In fact, America has been divided along two moving tribal lines for a very long time, and this odd reaction has happened before when this political faction came to power, although it doesn’t normally get this violent or this ugly. The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable — right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when the their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

The best description of this phenomenon comes from Abraham Lincoln in his famous address at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860. Trying to explain how impossible it was to deal with the Southern slave states using normal democratic means, he asked, “What will it take to satisfy them?”

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This is why they are so angry. It’s not enough for them to win. Those who opposed Trump must stop opposing him.We must agree that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, agree we should torture and kill suspected terrorists and their families, agree immigrants should be rounded up and deported, agree there should be guns in schools, agree women should be punished for having abortions and agree to all the rest of it. Until we stop resisting completely and declare that we are “avowedly with them” they will continue to believe that “all their troubles proceed from us.”

That is not going to happen. Trump’s forces may have won the election but they have not won the hearts and minds of the American people who didn’t vote for him. And they won’t. This administration will be met with fierce resistance from millions of people, from the moment Trump takes office until the day he leaves. There will be no appeasing him, and no easing of his followers’ guilt for what many of them know in their hearts to be an ugly and cruel impulses in consenting to this white nationalist program. It’s all on them.

Lincoln had this to say to his fellow Unionists about how to proceed in a situation such as this:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

What else can we do? 

“People take guests to the wine bar in their safe room”

by digby

The Russian oligarch mobster model seems to be catching on.

There is a specter haunting the Hamptons — one that’s turning some of the priciest properties in the country into fortresses equipped with bulletproof glass, weaponry and panic rooms.

“I sleep with a gun underneath my pillow: a Walther PPK/S, the same one James Bond carried,” said John Catsimatidis, owner of Red Apple Group and Gristedes Foods, who has a vacation property in East Quogue. “[My wife] Margo prefers a shotgun. Although, once, she thought she heard something, got the shotgun out and shot through the door.”

The billionaire and his family, like others in the Hamptons, are shaken up over concerns that the vicious Salvadorian gang MS-13 is too close for comfort. In April, members of the gang massacred four young men behind a soccer field in Central Islip. Three months later, a Hampton Bays brothel raided by police was found to be tagged with an MS-13 sign. And in 2016, a man with MS-13 connections broke into a Southampton home and sexually assaulted a woman.

Last year, Southampton Town Police Chief Steven Skrynecki publicly expressed concern that the gang might spread further east. When he deployed police equipped with antiterrorism gear, including automatic weapons, along the perimeters of summer 2017 charity galas, locals took note.

Modal TriggerSuspected members of the MS-13 gang are escorted to their arraignment in Mineola, Long Island in 2018.
Suspected members of the MS-13 gang are escorted to their arraignment in Mineola, Long Island in 2018.AP
One Southampton homeowner, who requested to remain anonymous for security reasons, recently outfitted her East End manse with bulletproof glass and hidden cameras throughout.

“[MS-13 is] in Suffolk County,” she said. “What’s an hour car ride? They are near.”

She’s not alone in her concern. “The home-security business is very event- and news-driven,” said Gary Blum, president of Armored Entry, a company that installs bullet-proof, super-secure windows and doors. “We get business when there is a tremendous amount of fear being generated.”

Blum’s products aren’t cheap, starting at $6,000 for a single window “that you can beat with a sledgehammer without making a dent.”

But the high price might actually be a selling point.

“The big thing [with homeowners] in the Hamptons is that if somebody has it, they [all] want it,” said Chris Cosban, a Long Island contractor who installs panic rooms in the area’s mansions. His company, Covert Interiors, charges between $25,000 and $200,000 for a standard space. (High-tech add-ons, such as fingerprint recognition, cost extra.) “There is a wow factor,” he said. “They like to brag about it.”

Herman Weisberg, managing director of the personal-security firm Sage Intelligence Group, said many of his clients look at their panic rooms like amenity spaces — doubling as home theaters, wine cellars or even gun vaults where weapons can be safely displayed.

“People used to open up their garages and show off their Lamborghinis,” Weisberg said. “Now they take guests to the wine bar in their safe room.”

Catsimatidis, who, in addition to worrying about MS-13 has also had his home broken into, is installing infrared sensors at his place. But that’s nothing compared to the security measures that Al Corbi, president of SAFE (Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments), an architecture-focused security firm, has designed for customers, including Hamptonites.

“I finished a system for $100 million,” he said of one West Coast project. “That sounds like a lot but there is nothing I know of, human or manmade, that could possibly harm this family for three generations, including global nuclear holocaust, a pandemic or a second Ice Age.” Plus, he added, “It’s like a Ritz-Carlton underground.”

He pointed to people such as billionaire investor Ira Rennert, who reportedly keeps a Hummer packed with guards at the edge of his 63-acre Sagaponack estate, which includes a 110,000-square-foot, 29-bedroom mansion.

“The neighbors do not love a Hummer sitting on Peters Pond beach,” the source said. “I don’t know why he needs that. But billionaires [like] security and there are a lot billionaires in the Hamptons. I think they get more paranoid the richer they become.”

They probably should be. If there was ever a good argument for confiscating these ridiculous peoples’ wealth this is it.

Presidents aren’t just figureheads

by digby

Imagine Trump in this situation:

In one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War, the top American military commander in Saigon activated a plan in 1968 to move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam until he was overruled by President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to recently declassified documents cited in a new history of wartime presidential decisions.

The documents reveal a long-secret set of preparations by the commander, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, to have nuclear weapons at hand should American forces find themselves on the brink of defeat at Khe Sanh, one of the fiercest battles of the war.

With the approval of the American commander in the Pacific, General Westmoreland had put together a secret operation, code-named Fracture Jaw, that included moving nuclear weapons into South Vietnam so that they could be used on short notice against North Vietnamese troops.

Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt W. Rostow, alerted the president in a memorandum on White House stationery.

The president rejected the plan, and ordered a turnaround, according to Tom Johnson, then a young special assistant to the president and note-taker at the meetings on the issue, which were held in the family dining room on the second floor of the White House.

The White House national security adviser, Walt W. Rostow, alerted President Lyndon B. Johnson of plans to move nuclear weapons into South Vietnam on the same day that Gen. William C. Westmoreland had told the American commander in the Pacific that he approved the operation.

“When he learned that the planning had been set in motion, he was extraordinarily upset and forcefully sent word through Rostow, and I think directly to Westmoreland, to shut it down,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview.

He said the president’s fear was “a wider war” in which the Chinese would enter the fray, as they had in Korea in 1950.

“Johnson never fully trusted his generals,” said Mr. Johnson, who is of no relation to the president. “He had great admiration for General Westmoreland, but he didn’t want his generals to run the war.”

Had the weapons been used, it would have added to the horrors of one of the most tumultuous and violent years in modern American history. Johnson announced weeks later that he would not run for re-election. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated shortly thereafter.

The story of how close the United States came to reaching for nuclear weapons in Vietnam, 23 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan to surrender, is contained in “Presidents of War,” a coming book by Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian.

“Johnson certainly made serious mistakes in waging the Vietnam War,” said Mr. Beschloss, who found the documents during his research for the book. “But we have to thank him for making sure that there was no chance in early 1968 of that tragic conflict going nuclear.”

The new documents — some of which were quietly declassified two years ago — suggest it was moving in that direction.

The New Stupidity

by tristero

Digby is absolutely right: Suffocation of Democracy by Christopher Browning is essential reading if you want to understand the dangerous similarities and equally dangerous differences between the Nazi and Trump regime. But it is not the only important article in the current NY Review.

The Autocracy App, a devastating indictment of Facebook and other predatory social media by Jacob Weisberg, also should not be missed (it’s behind a paywall, so buy a copy of the print edition, or subscribe). Once again, I’m struck by how incredibly stupid the digital engineers designing the 21st Century are.

Stupid? Yes, about everything that truly matters.

Mastering C++ and other computer “languages” in order to create a social network platform requires merely the ability to master rigid and fairly straightforward logical and mathematical procedures. On the other hand, creating a social network that doesn’t directly lead to genocidal horrors — as Facebook’s platforms did in Myanmar — now, that’s really fucking hard. That takes more than programming ability. That takes a deep understanding of ethics, compassion, empathy, and a willingness to tolerate limits on one’s own will to power. That takes genius.

But the men conceiving and programming social networks are no geniuses. If they were, they would have designed different algorithms, algorithms that would never have permitted anything like this to happen:

[H]ow Facebook not so inadvertently assisted the Trump campaign[:] “Project Alamo,” Trump’s digital operation, was far less sophisticated than Hillary Clinton’s. But precisely because it had so little digital expertise, Trump’s side relied heavily on Facebook employees who were provided to the Trump campaign as embedded advisers. Facebook supplies these technical experts to all large advertisers, and in Trump’s case it made sure to find ones who identified as Republicans (similar advisers were offered to the Clinton campaign but turned down). These technicians helped the campaign raise over $250 million and spend $70 million per month in the most effective way possible on the platform. 

The best weapon of Trump’s digital chief Brad Parscale was something called “Custom Audiences from Customer Lists,” an advertiser product released by Facebook in 2014. This tool allowed the Trump campaign to upload Republican voter lists, match them with Facebook’s user database, and micro-target so-called dark posts to groups of as few as twenty people. Using Democratic voter lists, it used the same kind of finely tuned, scientifically tested messages to suppress votes, for example by sending Haitian-Americans in South Florida messages about Bill Clinton’s having failed to do enough for Haiti. And because Trump’s inflammatory messages generated such high rates of “engagement,” Facebook charged his campaign a small fraction of the prices Hillary Clinton’s had to pay for its Facebook advertising. 

While it helped Trump cultivate precision toxins in digital petri dishes, Facebook was simultaneously undermining the old fact-based information ecology. As always, this destruction was incidental to Facebook’s goals of growing its user base, increasing engagement, and collecting more data. But much as it tries to do with individual users, Facebook got the news industry hooked. Publishers of newspapers and magazines understood that supporting the company’s constantly changing business priorities—Instant Articles on mobile, short-form video, live video, and so on—would lead to more traffic for their own pages and stories. 

For a time, the benefit flowed in both directions. But last year, under pressure to stop promoting fake news, Facebook began downgrading published content as a whole in its News Feed algorithm, prompting sharp declines in revenue and layoffs at many media organizations. Since January, a new emphasis on what Facebook calls “trusted” sources has had perverse effects, boosting traffic for untrustworthy sites, including Fox News and The Daily Mail, while reducing it for more reliable news organizations like The New York Times, CNN, and NBC. The reasons are unclear, but it appears that Facebook’s opaque methodology may simply equate trust with popularity.

Yes, in turning down help from Facebook, the Clinton campaign was inexcusably incompetent. But that pales in comparison to the deadly moral incompetence of a company that created a business model like Facebook’s that would proactively reward Trumpism .

Look, I’ve got nothing against STEM. Like any non-Republican, I admire and respect scientific information and reason. But a culture that worships STEM like ours? A culture where the most highly educated and financially rewarded citizens are so morally stunted they actually mistake libertarianism — a crude rationalization of narcissistic indulgence — for a philosophy?

I’ve been thinking a lot about a book I read when I was a little kid, Why We Can’t Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King. That is a work of genius. It would be nice if someone like Dr. King came along and “disrupted” Silicon Valley…

Daddy is afraid of you … and should be
by Tom Sullivan

“This is exactly what the Kavanaugh nomination has come to represent,” writes Gail Collins in the New York Times. “A vote for the nomination became a symbolic vote for a political ethos that thinks grabbing private parts is fun and complaining about sexual assault is a threat to young manhood.”

In an amoral president’s adolescent view of the world, boys will be boys and the alpha dog gets his pick of the females. For Trump’s vassals on Capitol Hellmouth, much more is at stake than having their way with women. Having their way with the rest of us is on the line.

The vituperation exhibited by Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his defenders is not about him or the Supreme Court. It is about the threat they feel to a system they see dying, one that is slipping through their fingers even as tighten their grip.

As heartbreaking and demoralizing as the Kavanaugh fight has been (assuming the outcome today is all but certain), what Republicans are desperate to preserve is not just their political power but the social arrangement that undergirds their world. That is, the way things ought to be:

The conservative moral hierarchy helps explain Republican attacks on affordable healthcare. Sound familiar? https://t.co/V0HEbgHu77 pic.twitter.com/YCwZMyKhEt— George Lakoff (@GeorgeLakoff) July 1, 2017

The American experiment was first formulated as a challenge to the way things ought to be. The radical experiment behind the new nation was that men (white men, anyway) might govern themselves rather than kings and princes and landed gentry. But that experiment would challenge the existing order only within limits. The new country permitted slavery. Women and children were still second-class citizens. Undesirables of whatever sort would remain hidden. Equality was never the rule and barely a guideline. It was an aspiration highly educated white men chose to try on like a pair of shoes.

In deference to demands by all who were once second-class and/or hidden, we today say all persons are created equal, not all men. But as with Christian sects willing to condone religious freedom only so long as lesser theologies know their places, persons other than white men becoming too numerous and noisy in their demand for realized, not theoretical equality threatens the prevailing order. And the tolerance of those in charge.

That order is under strain. Demographically and culturally if not economically, although that too. (The One Percent may be more comfortable than ever, but deepening inequality is adding to the strain.)

The U.S. Constitution has proved pliable enough in the past to expand the reach of inclusion painfully slowly over time. Yet never have the undemocratic elements of the basic structure of American government been set in such sharp relief as now. Privileged white men are credible by cultural agreement. Women are “credible,” but only when the boys are feeling deferential about recognizing them.

Democracy was never the rule here, only a guideline observed so long as it did not really challenge the way things ought to be. Democrats for their part have evolved in a century and a half to support, for the most part, the aspirations of their coalition members in seeking to enjoy full equality. Republicans for their part yearn for the 18th century when people knew their places and stayed in them. Pharisees, they attend to the trappings of democracy, but do not believe in it. Democracy is mob rule.

Lawrence O’Donnell Friday night expanded on the undemocratic features of our constitution that produced not only a sitting president elected by a minority but (presumably) a second Supreme Court justice confirmed by a U.S. Senate representing a minority.

David Rothkopf offered some advice via Twitter in response to the Senate’s decision Friday to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to a final vote. Rebirth is possible:

At the beginning of this country we faced worse. When slavery divided this country we faced worse. When world wars threatened this country we faced worse. When depression rocked our economy we faced worse. The enemies today are bad, as evil and corrupt as we've ever seen.— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) October 5, 2018

But they are not so bad that we cannot be reborn of this crisis as we have been so often before. he least among us is better than them. They remind us of that daily. The secret is in seeing their depredations as inspirations, today's defeats as the start of tomorrow's victories.— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) October 5, 2018

We should only lament our future if we lack the will to fight for it. I've found this week to be one of the worst in my memory. I have been heartbroken. But I also recognize this week's defeat as a call to action. There is an election in just a month.— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) October 5, 2018

We must remember their fears of the results of that election–that the American people will make themselves heard–is what made them rush for with this bleak charade of a Supreme Court nomination battle. They know we can win. They expect us to win.— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) October 5, 2018

They fear you. And well they should. But they will not give up power. We lessers will have to take it from them.

* * * * * * * * *

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

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens is pleased to announce that 22-year-old, Western Lowland Gorilla, Kumbuka, gave birth to a healthy infant. The 4.8-pound female was born on September 28th at 1:30 pm.

Labor began in the mixed-species habitat the Gorillas share with Colobus Monkeys and Mandrills, but concluded in the birthing-suite within the Gorilla shelter building. As soon as labor was reported, staff was able to call the Gorilla family indoors so that Kumbuka could be closely monitored in a quiet environment.

Kumbuka’s initial maternal behavior toward the baby was perfect and normal. Unfortunately, Kumbuka was cradling and carrying her youngster improperly- similarly to the way that she behaved when she lost two previous offspring at another zoo.

It is theorized that Kumbuka’s hearing disability may prevent her from detecting when her youngsters are in distress. Faced with a life-threatening situation, the extremely difficult decision was made to remove Kumbuka’s baby for short-term assisted rearing by Gorilla care staff. This decision is supported by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Gorilla SSP (Species Survival Plan) group.

The Gorilla SSP recommended that Kumbuka join the Jacksonville Zoo troop to learn maternal behavior from the other mother Gorillas and participate in a maternal training program.

After her arrival in 2014, Jacksonville Gorilla care staff began suspecting that Kumbuka may be hearing-impaired. In 2017, her condition was confirmed through consultation with audiologists from Nemours Children’s Specialty Care.

Her diagnosis provided valuable information for developing a specialized birth management plan to improve Kumbuka’s chances for maternal success. Throughout Kumbuka’s pregnancy, keepers worked to teach her the correct way to position an infant and other essential maternal skills, while also planning for the potential need to intervene based on her history.

Now the training continues with keepers showing her the proper way to hold and carry the infant. Kumbuka is watching and learning as keepers provide around-the-clock care to her infant, right next door to her and the rest of the Gorillas. Kumbuka can see and smell her baby and shows particular interest when the keepers demonstrate walking “gorilla-style” while holding the little one. Maintaining the close connection between mother and daughter is essential for a successful reintroduction. Once the baby is strong enough to adjust herself, she can hopefully be reunited.

More

A little bit of justice on an otherwise dark day for the legal system

by digby

Chicago:

A jury in Cook County, Illinois, has found white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot and killed black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, guilty of second-degree murder.

The jurors also convicted Van Dyke on 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm. He was found not guilty of a charge of misconduct in office.

There is no mandatory sentence for second-degree murder in Illinois, but each count of aggravated battery with a firearm can bring a sentence of 6 to 30 years—which means Van Dyke could potentially face 480 years behind bars. After the verdict was announced, the judge revoked the officer’s bail, and Van Dyke was taken into custody.

Police video footage released long after the shooting, which some observers had described as an “execution,” sparked widespread protests and calls for Mayor Rahm Emanuel to step down. (The embattled mayor announced early last month that he wouldn’t seek a third term.)

Opening arguments in the trial commenced on September 17. As my former colleague Brandon Patterson, who covered the case extensively, reported last month:

Van Dyke shot and killed McDonald on Chicago’s West Side in October 2014 while responding to a call about a teen breaking into cars. But city officials waited more than a year to release police dash-cam footage of the shooting—and did so only after a judge ruled in favor of an independent journalist whose public records requests were repeatedly denied. The video quickly went viral. It showed that Van Dyke fired 16 shots at McDonald—including several while the teen lay wounded on the ground. The footage contradicted the officer’s earlier claim that he’d shot McDonald, who was holding a knife, after the teen lunged at him.

Today’s verdict is somewhat surprising, given that police officers are rarely charged, much less convicted, for participation in a fatal shooting. As Patterson wrote:

Murder convictions are almost unheard of in such cases—although just last week, a Texas cop was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of murder for killing a 15-year-old outside a house party. Police are also occasionally found guilty of manslaughter—usually involuntary, which brings much shorter sentences than voluntary manslaughter. But police officers are rarely charged—much less convicted—in on-duty shootings. A Washington Post analysis of thousands of police-involved shootings from 2005 to 2015 counted just 54 officers indicted, and most were cleared or acquitted. Van Dyke is the first Chicago cop since 1980 to be charged with first-degree murder for an on-duty shooting. Over the last 15 years, however, Chicago has spent more than $700 million on legal fees, settlements, and judgments related to abuses by city police.

The city has been sitting on a powderkeg so this is very good news.

Yes, it is happening here. And we are helping them do it. Again.

by digby

Please read this sobering assessment of our current moment by Christopher R. Browning,  historian of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Europe between the two world wars. It’s important.
He draws some very uncomfortable parallels and also explains some important differences which are unfortunately not at all comforting.

Some similarities:

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s. 

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states—in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided. 

In threatening trade wars with allies and adversaries alike, Trump justifies increased tariffs on our allies on the specious pretext that countries like Canada are a threat to our national security. He combines his constant disparagement of our democratic allies with open admiration of authoritarians. His naive and narcissistic confidence in his own powers of personal diplomacy and his faith in a handshake with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un recall the hapless Neville Chamberlain (a man in every other regard different from Trump). Fortunately the US is so embedded in the international order it created after 1945, and the Republican Party and its business supporters are sufficiently alarmed over the threat to free trade, that Trump has not yet completed his agenda of withdrawal, though he has made astounding progress in a very short time. 

A second aspect of the interwar period with all too many similarities to our current situation is the waning of the Weimar Republic. Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way. 

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings. 

One can predict that henceforth no significant judicial appointments will be made when the presidency and the Senate are not controlled by the same party. McConnell and our dysfunctional and disrespected Congress have now ensured an increasingly dysfunctional and disrespected judiciary, and the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is in peril. 

Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance. 

I’m afraid he’s right. If we are counting on this group of Bizarroworld GOP “leaders” to sober up and save the country we really need to think again. They are all-in on Trumpism. Every day that passes, every partisan battle, only has them digging in their heels more forcefully.

But the left needs to take a serious look at history as well, recognize the true threat we are facing and start acting accordingly:

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy. 

In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats—dubbed “red fascists”—as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph.

By 1936 the democratic forces of France and Spain had learned the painful lesson of not uniting against the fascist threat, and even Stalin reversed his ill-fated policy and instructed the Communists to join democrats in Popular Front electoral alliances. In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist. The victory of the Popular Front in 1936 temporarily saved French democracy but led to the defeat of a demoralized and divided France in 1940, followed by the Vichy regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany while enthusiastically pursuing its own authoritarian counterrevolution.

We have sincere and deep disagreements within the left and center-left coalition. But the reflexive lifting of internecine fights to a higher level of importance, the blaming, the distancing, the unwillingness to see the more immediate threat to everyone, even in light of babies being taken from their mothers at the border or the cozying up to authoritarian dictators and disrespecting allies, is very worrying. This happened before and it did not end well.

This is not 2006. It’s not even 2016.  Just as the establishment center-right needs to bring every bit of power to bear to resist this illiberal regime, people on the left need to let go of their past grievances with the Democratic Party and look to the future. As imperfect as it is and has been, it remains the only means of state power available and that is not something we can afford to leave on the table. Likewise, it’s not useful to turn away or humiliate apostates who are willing to fight their own former allies. The defenders of democracy need all the help they can get in this emergency. Everyone can settle all their accounts when (if) the crisis has passed.

I urge you to read the whole thing as he also illustrates what he sees as the 21st-century differences having to do with a new level of sophistication in which modern illiberal right-wing regimes no longer have to deploy paramilitaries in the streets or take over the press. They seemed to have learned from the past even if the left has not. Simply using their state power to distort the democratic process and their private power to delegitimize the information stream they can accomplish much of what previous authoritarians did through demonstrations of authority and outright violence.

That is not to say that violence will be avoided:

The domestic agenda of Trump’s illiberal democracy falls considerably short of totalitarian dictatorship as exemplified by Mussolini and Hitler. But that is small comfort for those who hope and believe that the arc of history inevitably bends toward greater emancipation, equality, and freedom. Likewise, it is small comfort that in foreign policy Trump does not emulate the Hitlerian goals of wars of conquest and genocide, because the prospects for peace and stability are nevertheless seriously threatened. Escalating trade wars could easily tip the world economy into decline, and the Trump administration has set thresholds for peaceful settlements with Iran and North Korea that seem well beyond reach.

It is possible that Trump is engaged in excessive rhetorical posturing as a bargaining chip and will retreat to more moderate positions in both cases. But it is also possible that adversarial momentum will build, room for concessions will disappear, and he will plunge the country into serious economic or military conflicts as a captive of his own rhetoric. Historically, such confrontations and escalations have often escaped the control of leaders far more talented than Trump.

He doesn’t mention it, but we also have a simmering conflagration in the middle east and on the Indian sub-continent, nuclear weapons and a president who is outright encouraging the whole world to arm up as quickly as possible.

What could go wrong?

This piece is meant to alarm. It should. We are all watching this unfold on a day to day basis, many of us stressed out and upset, aware that this is a very scary historical inflection point. Something has gone very wrong and we aren’t quite sure how to deal with it. I will just point out that the world may end up being lucky that the worlds only superpower produced the demagogic authoritarian Donald Trump instead of someone who was either more intelligent and competent or more malleable in the hands of an alt-right manipulator like Steve Bannon. That is small comfort, though. Incompetent imbeciles are often more dangerous than efficient geniuses.

Link.

The stupidest thing you will hear all day and it didn’t come from Trump

by digby

lol Collins says she hopes Kavanaugh will help bridge the partisan divide on the Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/busFysQXld— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 5, 2018

She’s voting yes, of course. And that’s the end of that.

I hate to be too cynical here but I feel that I must remind people that this was baked in the cake on the day Trump was elected. They had one open seat they’d stolen already. And of course Kennedy would retire. They made sure of it. The far right majority on the court is their holy grail.

Elections matter. A lot.

The Supreme Court is now completely illegitimate. But let’s face it, it’s been that way for a while, as this piece by Michael Tomasky lays out in great detail. That’s just the reality we have to deal with going forward.

Be smart Dems. The refs have been well worked.

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

The reopened FBI background check on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was always going to be something of a sham. Consider how the request by Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona was originally worded in the Judiciary Committee meeting last Friday:

I think that we ought to do what we can to make sure that we do all due diligence with a nomination this important. I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to but not more than one week, in order to let the FBI do an investigation, limited in time and scope to the current allegations that are there.

Until that moment, it had been assumed that the Republicans were going to “plow through,” as promised by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. When Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said they were with Flake, McConnell and the White House knew they had to go along. They didn’t have the votes.

Nonetheless, the fix was always in. Flake’s request for a short investigation “limited in scope to the current allegations that are there” was wide open to interpretation. Which “current allegations” were they talking about? At that point, two other women had come forward following Christine Blasey Ford’s initial accusation, and there was ample reason to investigate whether Kavanaugh had committed perjury multiple times during the hearings.

Everyone was aware by this time that the Senate had no authority to order the FBI to reopen the background check. It was up to the White House to issue that directive. What this meant in practice was that the White House would likely burn up time on the clock as much as possible and ensure that the “scope” would be very limited indeed. And that is exactly what happened.

This was cleverly disguised in a fog of shifting responsibility and presidential comments that left everyone scratching their heads about what was really going on. When asked whether he had limited the FBI investigation, President Trump said on Saturday, “They’re going to do whatever they have to do, whatever it is they do. They’ll be doing things that we have never even thought of. And hopefully at the conclusion everything will be fine.” Later on Twitter he said, “I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion.”

That sounded as if the White House had decided to allow the FBI to do its job as it normally would. Experts all said this would be something the bureau could easily accomplish. After all, the FBI has thousands of employees and tremendous capacity. But reporters were already hearing that the White House would actually only allow the FBI to interview four people. Then the stoies changed and nobody really knew what was happening.

The White House insisted it would defer to the Senate, while senators insisted it was out of their hands and the White House was in charge. On Wednesday the investigation was concluded and it became clear the FBI had only been permitted to interview six people, which did not include either Kavanaugh or Ford. Meanwhile, dozens of other people were coming forward with corroborating evidence, offering to make statements under oath. They received no response from the FBI.

All of this brings up an interesting conundrum. Theoretically, the FBI had a choice to make here. Trump said publicly, more than once, that he wanted agents to have free rein, follow all leads and do a thorough investigation. Obviously, the bureau was getting other private instructions from the White House. They could have chosen to take the president’s public comments as their marching orders rather than the other ones. They could even claim that they had it in writing:

NBC News incorrectly reported (as usual) that I was limiting the FBI investigation of Judge Kavanaugh, and witnesses, only to certain people. Actually, I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion. Please correct your reporting!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2018

But the FBI did not seek that kind of confrontation, and that’s not surprising. The president and his henchmen in the House Freedom Caucus have taken a page out of the old conservative movement’s playbook. For years Republicans hectored the so-called liberal media for being biased against conservatives. The point was to make journalists second-guess themselves, to create a sense of paranoia and caution about being too aggressive in reporting what conservatives were doing. It was highly successful and tilted the coverage for decades, helping pave the way for the “post-truth” crisis in which we find ourselves today.

Trump has taken that tactic to a place I don’t think anyone ever expected by applying it to the intelligence and law enforcement institutions. (Of course, no president has ever been so personally threatened by criminal and counter-intelligence investigations before, either.) He has been relentless in his criticism, and the effect on these institutions is to make them extremely cautious about being seen as hostile to Trump Look at what happened to people like Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The message is clear.

That’s how “working the refs” gets the job done.

Political reporters assume the Democrats are going to jump on this if they win the House in January:

If the Democrats take power in either House next year, they will of course subpoena every single FBI document related to this investigation, including all the tips to field offices that went unexamined. And all of Chris Wray’s memos about his interactions with the White House.

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) October 4, 2018

Democrats should think hard about that. Echoing the Freedom Caucus approach and bringing the FBI before Congress over this might not be the wisest use of oversight power. Even though it’s arguably more important for the long term, impeaching Kavanaugh once he’s on the Supreme Court (assuming that happens) would be even more difficult than impeaching Trump. Kavanaugh’s performance before the Judiciary Committee last week certainly doesn’t lead one to believe that he would ever have the grace to resign, regardless of what they turn up. Putting the FBI on the hot seat over this, unless it’s very carefully choreographed, could backfire.

And Democrats may have more immediate problems come January:

If you hate what you’re hearing about the FBI Kavanaugh investigation, know this is precisely how the White House will run the Russia investigation if they get the chance. It is not just an outrage…it is a warning.

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) September 29, 2018

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., seems to have anticipated this potential problem, making sure not to hold the FBI in contempt for the poor investigation and laying it at the feet of the White House in his comments on Thursday.