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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

When The Vermin Complain

We’re getting a lot of that “look what you made me do” rationale from Trump voters (and frankly quite a few Democrats as well.) If only liberals (aka “vermin”, “scum”, garbage” “low IQ”) didn’t look down on the Real Americans none of this wouldn’t have happened. In fact, I think it’s clear that if only Democrats would just agree with everything Republicans say and do, none of this would have happened.

This is entirely predictable. It’s happened after every Republican win in my lifetime. Interestingly, no navel gazing ever occurs after Democratic victories. Even when they try, as they did after 2012, nobody paid any attention and the press shrugged.

I find that it’s best to just let this work itself out. There are always lessons to be learned but we generally end up more or less back in the same place because the divisions in our country exist regardless, even if we aren’t always as divided (and hostile) as we have been lately. It’s a fight over values, morals, philosophy and ideology and telling people not to make judgments about each other when we seeriously disagree is useless.

Having said that, it’s long been my observation that the right side of the dial really hates the left and the left mostly just doesn’t care much that they are hated. And that’s really the problem. The right consistently tries to be provocative in order to gain attention and it works sometimes but in the end the left just isn’t that interested in their bs. They probably should be but that does not translate to becoming more like them.

I’ve never understood why that’s such a common assumption. Understanding doesn’t mean capitulation. It certainly doesn’t mean agreeing with them. But for too many, that seems to be the first thought.

And then there are those who automatically think that because the country moved right, the obvious response is to go further left. But that’s a story for another post.

I Want You To Watch This

incoming Trump "border czar" Tom Homan on Fox Business says he expects the military to be involved in his mass deportation

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) 2024-11-12T15:07:28.623Z

Hannity can see that this (apparently drunk) guy is going to be a nightmare for Republicans, not to mention the country. But there’s nothing he can do.


These people won’t see it coming:

They absolutely don’t think any of Trump’s policies will apply to them. It’s a wild suspension of disbelief.

Molly Jong-Fast (@mollyjongfast.bsky.social) 2024-11-12T00:36:51.040Z

Watch to the end of this too. These voters are deluded:

Then read this about some undocumented workers who themselves don’t believe they will be deported. Sigh.

I assume that some Latino Trump voters are fine with deporting undocumented immigrants. That’s an old story: pulling the ladder up behind them. But there are an awful lot of stories out there just like these folks who think that if you’re a good person and “haven’t done anything illegal” and happen to be undocumented that they aren’t going to come after you. No. They consider undocumented people to be criminals and they are going to deport them.

Sure they say they’re coming for the gang members “first” but let’s be clear. Gang members and criminals have always been deportable. Nobody’s been sitting around saying, “we really don’t want to arrest MS-13 because they’re refugees.” The point of this is to terrify undocumented people, including DREAMers, by the way. These folks who voted for Trump had better hope their good, law-abiding undocumented relatives don’t get a speeding ticket or need to go to the hospital with appendecitis. If they come into contact with authorities of any kind they’re going to be in big trouble.

If you think they won’t do it, ask yourself if you thought doctors would let women bleed out in parking lots because they were having a miscarriage and they were afraid to give them the care they need because of abortion bans. There are plenty of places in this country that will eagerly help this sadistic monster and his henchmen finger anyone who isn’t in the country legally. Being “good” has nothing to do with it.

And, by the way, those folks in that video who are naturalized citizens? They need to think twice too:

Take A Deep Breath

Hold it. Exhale slowly. Get busy.

(Photo credit: WLOS Staff)

Here in still-purple North Carolina, the 2024 election clock ran out at 7:30 pm last Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean we’re done. We’re in overtime.

The contest to hold the critical seat of state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs is razor thin and closing as local boards of election count more absentee and provisional ballots. We’re out on the streets urging voters (friendlies, we hope) whose absentee ballots need defects corrected, or who need to present acceptable IDs at their local Board, to git ‘er done. The “curing” deadline is Thursday, close of business.

So I’ve got to get rolling. As pundits from the Church of the Savvy blame Democrats for the American carnage that comes next and treat Donald Trump’s 75 million voters as having clean hands, let Stuart Stevens you offer some reassurance. (You already know what I think.) [Emphasis mine]

I’ve been involved in winning presidential races and races that lost. One common thread is that everyone seems to have a reason why you won or lost which usually reflects a personal perspective or agenda.

So here’s mine: I think VP Harris ran a very good campaign that operated at a high level. She had a great convention, crushed Trump in a debate, and put on a series of big event rallies that were the best I’d ever seen.

As a Republican operative, I spent years pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party and I’m not here to say it doesn’t need to go through a period of questioning and self-reflection. Those are much larger questions than one election and one campaign. But the Republican party is an anti-democratic movement, attacking the pillars of American democracy from elections to the judicial system.

I understand those who say that if there had been a “normal” Democratic primary, the results would have been better. Maybe. But think about it. In modern political history, every time a sitting VP has run for the nomination, that VP has won. Perhaps it would have been different this time and the eventual nominee would have emerged stronger for the process. But more likely there would have been a bloody primary fight that left the nominee broke and trying to patch together a fractured party to face a Republican party that has become Donald Trump’s party. In all probability, VP Harris would have won that primary and been in a weakened and vulnerable position when it was finally resolved in May or June.

I would say to my Democratic friends to go through this post-election process with open minds and hearts but never doubt that the Democratic party is the only pro-democracy party in America. No one will have a position in Trump’s administration who is not an election denier adhering to the Big Lie. That’s toxic to a country’s sense of self and the damage will take a generation to repair, if it is possible to heal.

Losing an election does not mean that you were wrong and they were right. It means you lost an election. I grew up in Mississippi watching my parents back candidates opposed to segregation. When those candidates lost, and they did for a long time, my parents didn’t question if they were on the right side. They didn’t ask themselves if the majority who supported segregation had proven the justness of their cause by winning.

The mid-terms start after the Super Bowl. It will likely be a good election for Democrats and then the 2028 presidential race will be upon us. After a loss, the days seem long but the months will pass quickly. Reflect, rest up, but come back prepared to fight. Fight not because victory is assured but fight because not to fight is to give up. And if we do that, we no longer deserve to call ourselves Americans. Read less

I started my day by texting the voters with defective absentees who weren’t home when I dropped by yesterday. See you tomorrow.

The Lamentation Of The Women

Yes, they mean it

“Blinded by the Right,” David Brock’s memoir of his time as a conservative operative contains anecdotes on Grover Norquist, the anti-tax radical (by G.W. Bush-era standards), once considered “field marshal of the Bush plan.” Among them, his fondness for rhetoric like Lenin’s “probe with bayonets, looking for weakness.” Lenin’s portrait hung in Norquist’s Washington living room, Brock writes. And another: “Grover Norquist sent out an invitation to a post election party at his Capitol Hill home. Quoting from the movie Conan the Barbarian, it said: ‘TO CRUSH ENEMIES, SEE THEM DRIVEN BEFORE YOU, AND HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN.'” Brock added the all-caps.

Norquist was tame by standards of the first Donald Trump administration. That was the Trump who deployed tear gas and rubber bullets outside the White House to clear the streets for a photo-op. His generals convinced him shooting protesters in the legs was uncool.

Trump 2.0 really does mean to deport millions. Tom Homan, his incoming Border Czar and Project 2025 author, doesn’t need Janine Melnitz answering his phone and saying, yes, of course, they’re serious.

Michele Goldberg suggests you consider Trump’s first staff picks if you thought he wasn’t serious. The column’s photo is Trump adviser, Stephen Miller. He always looks out of place without an SS uniform and cap with a death’s head:

In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no undocumented immigrant would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”

Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in The Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.

Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest migrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.

Norquist was darkly joking. Guys like Miller and Homan really do look forward to hearing the lamentations of the women.

Rounding up and deporting the undocumented and refugees is just until Miller and Homan get around to denaturalizing the rest who “unlawfully obtained citizenship” or don’t meet their approval.

Here’s the lede from that 2020 piece Miller referenced by Katie Benner:

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had created an official section in its immigration office to strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants, a move that gives more heft to the Trump administration’s broad efforts to remove from the country immigrants who have committed crimes.

The president’s friends (Elon Musk), of course, will get a pass.

Introducing today’s “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent,” Sargent writes:

During the campaign, Donald Trump openly advertised that as president, he’ll use the state to retaliate against his enemies in every way he can. Now The New York Times reports that some of his advisers are urging him to absolutely make good on that threat. And right on cue, Trump erupted on social media, calling for investigations into people supposedly spreading false rumors about his intention to sell shares of his Truth Social—a revealing indicator of the types of abuses of power that we can expect from a second Trump term.

New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser offers Sargent an image of the Trump 2.0 that we didn’t need:

For someone like Donald Trump—and for all administrations, but particularly for Trump—personnel is policy in effect.

And you’re alluding to this very chilling interview that I had with a former very senior national security official who spent a lot of time in the Oval Office with Trump himself, who told me not long after Trump’s term ended, that this person viewed Trump as the velociraptors in the first Jurassic Park movie. You remember the children run to hide from the velociraptors in the kitchen and they think they’re safe because they’re behind the locked door, and then click, they hear the door handle turn because the velociraptor has learned how to open the door. They’ve learned how to adapt while hunting their prey. The point was Trump understands far better what’s needed to have an administration and a White House that does his bidding rather than having people around him who saw themselves as guardrails against his own inclinations.

Those who held in check Trump’s blacker impulses won’t be around to stop him after January 20. Republicans on the Hill won’t lift a finger to stop him, and the Supreme Court’s given him near-complete immunity.

Glasser adds:

Remember that in his first term in office, Donald Trump would go around, he would go to events … He spoke at an event, for example, in the summer of 2019 in which he literally said, The Constitution gives me the power to do anything I want. So he already believed that even before this immunity decision and it’s quite possible that Trump will pick various fights, because that’s what he does in any role that he’s ever been in, and then say, Here, I’ve gone very, very far out on a limb because who’s going to stop me? Who’s going to stop me? 

And Trump willl be working from a template handed him by his pal in Moscow:

My husband and I were correspondents [in Russia] in the first few years of Putin’s term, and Putin moved with extraordinary speed and focus to dismantle the fledgling institutions of Russian democracy. That has been the template and the playbook for other would-be authoritarians who are working within a democratic system. The speed and rapidity with which Trump can make very big changes in our system has been an under-appreciated aspect that I think is now going to kick in.

I’m very sure we are all not going to appreciate what comes out of Trump 2.0. It’s Trump’s enemies and immigrants who will not appreciate it first.

It’s The Media, Stupid

I have already written about the incumbent rout all over the world theory. I’m persuaded that was probably the main driver of this election. It’s just sad that the Republicans are so far gone that they put up their previous loser, a convicted felon who attempted a coup d’etat, but that’s how we roll here in ‘Murica. We are so exceptional.

I think the second point is just obvious. We have never had a woman president and a rank misogynist brute beat the two that we have managed to nominate. The racism is as American as apple pie and you don’t have to be a political scientist to know that it has an effect.

But the third reason is something I think we need to explore much further. Our mediaecosystem is in deep, deep trouble and regardless of the macro political influences, we are going to be under threat of this fascist movement.

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic wrote a very good piece on this. He notes that people are rightfully stunned that we would elect someone like Trump. Didn’t they know how unfit he is? And why didn’t they?

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

He rightly observes that this is why Trump won and why he exists in politics in the first place.

In fact, I think Trump isn’t even a political figure at all. He’s a celebrity cult leader. And the right wing media is what makes him accessible to the fan base.

Tomasky asks you to imagine Trump winning if there were no Fox News and all we had was The NY Times and Walter Cronkite. It’s very hard to imagine. In fact, he suggests that if that had been the case, the Republicans, as they have done in the past, would have banded together to put him away.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

Trump and MAGA are creatures of the rightwing media ecosystem not the other way around. It’s not that there’s some super talented “messaging” team that understands exactly how to reach all those Trump voters with what they want to hear. Their right wing media (and their audiences) are telling them what they want to hear.

And what did they know about Harris and Trump?

I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

As he points out, this is just what millions of people believe is “the news” and describes how they are absorbing it at home, work and in their commute. And I would add that Trump has also indoctrinated them to believe that anything else they hear is “fake.” So even if they happen to come upon reality, they simply don’t believe it.

This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

Terrifyingly, they are just getting started. They are hoovering up newspapers everywhere with their eyes on the last of our papers of record. They want total dominance and they have the money to buy it. Just look at what Musk has done with twitter.

He says, “Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.”But just look how the publishers of the LA Times and the Washington Post behaved in the run up to the election seeing how close it was going to be. And the weird sanewashing of Trump in the NY Times throughout the campaign. They were cowards. I wouldn’t expect much from them.

So who is going to do this? I honestly don’t know. Tomasky mentions the social media platforms only in passing but I think they are even more of a concern. And that’s where I suspect the opposition may be able to make some inroads. New media is still being created and there are plenty of directions it can go that could benefit the opposition and be accessible by people who don’t get their information through the press. Like Tomasky, I hope that people are thinking about this because between the disinformation, propaganda, oligarchical interests and authoritarian motivations we could be looking at a very bleak future beyond Trump.

In A Nut Shell

“These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, X, and Reddit.”

You can do all the postmortems in the world but in the end it comes down to that. We are living in separate political realities.

Over half of Trump voters say they don’t follow political news at all. It’s hard to say if that’s just because they don’t see Joe Rogan and Youtube as political news or if they genuinely just don’t consume any political news at all. It’s not unlikely that some people just follow what people in their families, workplaces or communities say as much as anything. Those who identify as evangelical Christian probably get a lot of political information from their churches, even though it’s not explicitly identified as that. All it takes is one Fox News junkie or a Rogan fan in any group to influence several people in their orbit.

The Last Of The Old School Patriots

Biden: This is the last time I will stand here at Arlington as commander in chief. It's been the greatest honor of my life, to lead you, to serve you, to care for you, to defend you, just as you defended us generation after generation after generation.

Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2024-11-11T17:39:54.867Z

I don’t think Trump will be celebrating suckers and losers day this way over the next four years. What’s in it for him?

Trump’s Co-President

He’s also a very sensitive guy:

And Trump just loves him:

Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club has been brimming in the last 48 hours with two kinds of people: those angling for a job in the president-elect’s incoming administration, and those trying to influence him into hiring their picks for the top spots.

But the one person who has loomed over it all and has exerted a great deal of influence is Elon Musk, according to multiple sources. The tech billionaire has been seen at the resort in Palm Beach, Florida, almost every day since Trump won the election last week, dining with him on the patio some evenings and hanging out with his family Sunday at the golf course.

Musk has been in the room when multiple world leaders have phoned Trump, and he’s weighed in on staffing decisions, with the SpaceX and Tesla CEO even making clear his preference for certain roles.

In one instance, Musk was with Trump at Mar-a-Lago when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called to congratulate the president-elect the day after the election, according to a source briefed on the call. Trump put the call on speaker, and Zelensky thanked Musk for his help providing communications to Ukraine through the billionaire’s Starlink internet service.

On Sunday, Musk waded into the GOP Senate leadership fight, endorsing Sen. Rick Scott after the Florida Republican swiftly backed Trump’s demand that anyone vying to be leader support recess appointments for his nominees — a way for presidents to attempt to bypass Congress that Senate Democrats could essentially block.

Musk is not only close to Trump but also with his transition co-chair, Howard Lutnick — the billionaire CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald who is leading the personnel side of the transition.

Sources have described Trump as enamored with Musk.

“We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them,” the president-elect said during his victory speech early Wednesday morning.

While Musk himself is not formally expected to take a position in Trump’s administration, he doesn’t really need to, one source said, noting the X owner is having just as much influence from the outside.

While Trump and Musk had publicly pitched the latter leading an efficiency commission to slash spending inside the federal government, CNN reported Thursday that a source familiar with the conversations around Musk said it seemed unlikely he would even want a full-time government position, given what that would mean for his role in the companies he helms.

Instead, it seemed more plausible that Musk would be appointed to a blue-ribbon committee, where he would still have enormous access but would not be subject to government ethics rules, which would require him to divest or put assets in a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest.

Tesla’s shares have risen 15%, bringing it to a two year high. He made at least 15 billion on the day after the election. It’s win-win.

“Let’s Not Over Egg The Pudding”

The New York Review of Books offered a Q&A with this person:

In Joseph O’Neill’s first essay in our pages, he warned readers that “the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption of legitimacy,” contrasted with “the curious timidity of Democrats.” In that instance, he was describing the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida, but he has made clear in his subsequent writing to what extent that dynamic has dogged American politics ever since: from an article about Democrats’ failure to win statewide elections—“Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism—and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks”—to his analysis of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s campaign. “What will they do?” he asked in October. “Stick with the cautious, timid posture we saw at the veep debate, or go on the offensive? It seems extraordinary that this is a question at all.”

There’s a lot to it and I don’t agree with all of it. Some of what he says seems contradictory to me. But that said, in contrast to 90% of the ritualized Democratic self-flaggelation pieces in which everyone miraculously discovers that their personal hobby horses are the One True Reason why the party failed, this one struck me as a realistic take on the whole thing without the hysterical navel gazing:

I don’t think Harris lost because of campaign missteps. To put it another way: it’s hard to think of a campaign she could have run that would have overcome the negative ideological environment in which the election took place. We don’t yet fully understand that environment. We do know that the disastrously misguided political operations of the Democratic Party over the last four years contributed significantly to the problem. Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Garland, et al. utterly failed to grasp the threat posed by Donald Trump’s Republican Party, including its Supreme Court branch. They sentimentally overestimated the attachment of American whites to the liberal order. They failed to take seriously that vast numbers of Americans inhabit far-right information communities. They undervalued the importance of showing cultural solidarity with working-class voters. And so on and so forth. A lot went wrong, politically. The richest, most militarily secure democracy in the world doesn’t embrace authoritarianism unless lots of mistakes have been made. 

The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. Of course, political science is not designed to investigate this kind of stuff. The clearest insights we have come from the realm of philosophy and literature. Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi did not rely on focus groups.

The magnitude of Harris’s loss also makes me wonder about alternatives outside of party politics. If the Democratic party ends up tacking right or otherwise appeasing Trump on, say, some of his more draconian immigration policies in order to stave off cuts to social security, do you have a sense of how people might organize against both parties? Historically, how have voters been able to advance policies that both the ruling and opposition parties are against?

Harris lost, yes—but let’s not overegg the pudding. Trump’s margin of victory was humdrum. His final vote tally will fall millions short of the votes won by Biden in 2020. The opposition to him is huge and intense and in the right. So let’s be clear: this malicious criminal does not have the barbaric mandate he claims for himself. On the contrary, it is the opposition that has a mandate, derived from centuries of democratic tradition.

If one thing will guarantee excess years of dictatorship, it would be fracturing the antifascist opposition into squabbling factions. Republicans and their allies in social media will do everything they can to divide the left. The responsibility is on all of us, and the Democratic Party in particular, to ensure that this doesn’t happen. In practice this will mean listening and deferring to the concerns and values of the base, whose grassroots efforts prevented the Democrats from suffering a collapse in the Senate and House.

What do you think the first hundred days of Trump’s term will look like? Are there any specific policies or obsessions that you think will occupy him?

I think we can expect an attempt to round up, incarcerate, and deport tens of thousands of suspected undocumented immigrants. We can expect a flurry of executive orders designed to transform and weaponize the Department of Justice. We can expect business leaders to gather in the Oval Office to pay homage to the president. We can expect Elon Musk to be horribly prominent, possibly as an enforcer of Trump’s promises to impose tariffs on imported goods. I’m going to assume that the Democratic Party, as we speak, is preparing for these and other eventualities. I am sure Trump will overreach. It is up to the opposition to make him pay for his overreaches. It is not our job to help him “succeed.” It’s not our job to “unite the country” or, as President Biden has suggested, “turn down the temperature.” It’s our job to make Trump fail, fail again, fail worse.

I sure hope the Democrats can get through this period of penance and self-mortification quickly because Trump is moving fast. He just named Stephen Miller as his Deputy Chief of Staff for policy and Tom “we’ll deport US citizens” Homan as his “immigration czar.” Elise Stefanik to the UN. Amnd he’s issued an edict that the Senate must pass all of his cabinet choices as recess appointments, circumventing the constitutional requirement for advise and consent. And that’s with a 53 vote majority. (How bad must these choices be?)

I’m not sure what the Democrats will be able to do to slow down this Project 2025 wet dream but they’d better get through their soul searching quickly and recognize their responsibilities as the opposition. There’s a lot to do.

The Niemöller Countdown

“Who Goes Nazi?”

Columnist calls on President Roosevelt. Washington, D.C., May 29 [1940]. Dorothy Thompson, newspaper columnist who recently returned from Europe, called on President Roosevelt at the White House today. Photo via Library of Congress.

The Niemöller Countdown has started. The Krassenstein Brothers spell it out:

BREAKING: Trump will appoint Tom Homan, a Project 2025 architect, as his Border Czar.

But don’t worry—he says he won’t separate families; instead, he plans to deport them together. Does this include U.S.-born children of immigrants? Those born in the U.S., who have never even been to countries like El Salvador, will now have to be “deported” there if they want to see their parents again.

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It’s now oh-so familiar. Donald Trump’s xenophobic litany dates from his golden escalator ride in 2015. The mad king doesn’t know the difference between seeking asylum and being committed to one (in Venezuela). So Trump’s incoming administration is poised to purge the country of immigrants. Heads up. They won’t stop there.

Journalist Dorothy Thompon knew what she was witnessing as early as 1931. Greg Olear writes about it at his Substack:

No American was more vociferously opposed to fascism than the foreign correspondent turned columnist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson. She was the original head of Antifa—the O.G. “Auntie Fa.”

From her press-box seat in Berlin, she watched as Adolf Hitler consolidated power in Germany. When, after years of futile trying, she was finally able to pin down the leader of the burgeoning Nazi Party for an interview in 1931, the article she wrote about the experience for Cosmopolitan, and the expansion of that article that became her 1932 book I Saw Hitler!, so thoroughly humiliated her subject that Hitler personally ordered her expelled from the country—the 1930s equivalent of being blocked on Twitter by Donald Trump. Talk about a badge of honor!

Thompson got under the future mass murderer’s skin:

Olear reaches back for a Thompson article worthy of resurrection as a cautionary tale. To this day, it’s not clear if it is analysis or satire:

In August 1941—almost two full years after Hitler invaded Poland but four months before Pearl Harbor compelled the United States to enter the war—Thompson published a famous piece in Harper’s Magazine called “Who Goes Nazi?” It’s been making the social-media rounds again this week, for obvious reasons. 

Here it is:

Who Goes Nazi?

by Dorothy Thompson

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

At any rate, let us look round the room.

The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.

He has never attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him. . . . Why not?

Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why? . . . Why the one and not the other?

Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.

Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.

On the other hand, Mrs. F would never go Nazi. She is the most popular woman in the room, handsome, gay, witty, and full of the warmest emotion. She was a popular actress ten years ago; married very happily; promptly had four children in a row; has a charming house, is not rich but has no money cares, has never cut herself off from her own happy-go-lucky profession, and is full of sound health and sound common sense. All men try to make love to her; she laughs at them all, and her husband is amused. She has stood on her own feet since she was a child, she has enormously helped her husband’s career (he is a lawyer), she would ornament any drawing-room in any capital, and she is as American as ice cream and cake.

II

How about the butler who is passing the drinks? I look at James with amused eyes. James is safe. James has been butler to the ‘ighest aristocracy, considers all Nazis parvenus and communists, and has a very good sense for “people of quality.” He serves the quiet editor with that friendly air of equality which good servants always show toward those they consider good enough to serve, and he serves the horsy gent stiffly and coldly.

Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur, is helping serve to-night. He is a product of a Bronx public school and high school, and works at night like this to help himself through City College, where he is studying engineering. He is a “proletarian,” though you’d never guess it if you saw him without that white coat. He plays a crack game of tennis—has been a tennis tutor in summer resorts—swims superbly, gets straight A’s in his classes, and thinks America is okay and don’t let anybody say it isn’t. He had a brief period of Youth Congress communism, but it was like the measles. He was not taken in the draft because his eyes are not good enough, but he wants to design airplanes, “like Sikorsky.” He thinks Lindbergh is “just another pilot with a build-up and a rich wife” and that he is “always talking down America, like how we couldn’t lick Hitler if we wanted to.” At this point Bill snorts.

Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.

H is an historian and biographer. He is American of Dutch ancestry born and reared in the Middle West. He has been in love with America all his life. He can recite whole chapters of Thoreau and volumes of American poetry, from Emerson to Steve Benet. He knows Jefferson’s letters, Hamilton’s papers, Lincoln’s speeches. He is a collector of early American furniture, lives in New England, runs a farm for a hobby and doesn’t lose much money on it, and loathes parties like this one. He has a ribald and manly sense of humor, is unconventional and lost a college professorship because of a love affair. Afterward he married the lady and has lived happily ever afterward as the wages of sin.

H has never doubted his own authentic Americanism for one instant. This is his country, and he knows it from Acadia to Zenith. His ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and in all the wars since. He is certainly an intellectual, but an intellectual smelling slightly of cow barns and damp tweeds. He is the most good-natured and genial man alive, but if anyone ever tries to make this country over into an imitation of Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or Petain’s systems H will grab a gun and fight. Though H’s liberalism will not permit him to say it, it is his secret conviction that nobody whose ancestors have not been in this country since before the Civil War really understands America or would really fight for it against Nazism or any other foreign ism in a showdown.

But H is wrong. There is one other person in the room who would fight alongside H and he is not even an American citizen. He is a young German emigre, whom I brought along to the party. The people in the room look at him rather askance because he is so Germanic, so very blond-haired, so very blue-eyed, so tanned that somehow you expect him to be wearing shorts. He looks like the model of a Nazi. His English is flawed—he learned it only five years ago. He comes from an old East Prussian family; he was a member of the post-war Youth Movement and afterward of the Republican “Reichsbanner.” All his German friends went Nazi—without exception. He hiked to Switzerland penniless, there pursued his studies in New Testament Greek, sat under the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, came to America through the assistance of an American friend whom he had met in a university, got a job teaching the classics in a fashionable private school; quit, and is working now in an airplane factory—working on the night shift to make planes to send to Britain to defeat Germany. He has devoured volumes of American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the Federalist papers, believes in the United States of Europe, the Union of the English-speaking world, and the coming democratic revolution all over the earth. He believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.

The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power. He talks about the workmen in the factory where he is employed. . . . He took the job “in order to understand the real America.” He thinks the men are wonderful. “Why don’t you American intellectuals ever get to them; talk to them?”

I grin bitterly to myself, thinking that if we ever got into war with the Nazis he would probably be interned, while Mr. B and Mr. G and Mrs. E would be spreading defeatism at all such parties as this one. “Of course I don’t like Hitler but . . .”

Mr. J over there is a Jew. Mr. J is a very important man. He is immensely rich—he has made a fortune through a dozen directorates in various companies, through a fabulous marriage, through a speculative flair, and through a native gift for money and a native love of power. He is intelligent and arrogant. He seldom associates with Jews. He deplores any mention of the “Jewish question.” He believes that Hitler “should not be judged from the standpoint of anti-Semitism.” He thinks that “the Jews should be reserved on all political questions.” He considers Roosevelt “an enemy of business.” He thinks “It was a serious blow to the Jews that Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.”

The saturnine Mr. C—the real Nazi in the room—engages him in a flatteringly attentive conversation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is definitely attracted by Mr. C. He goes out of his way to ask his name—they have never met before. “A very intelligent man.”

Mr. K contemplates the scene with a sad humor in his expressive eyes. Mr. K is also a Jew. Mr. K is a Jew from the South. He speaks with a Southern drawl. He tells inimitable stories. Ten years ago he owned a very successful business that he had built up from scratch. He sold it for a handsome price, settled his indigent relatives in business, and now enjoys an income for himself of about fifty dollars a week. At forty he began to write articles about odd and out-of-the-way places in American life. A bachelor, and a sad man who makes everybody laugh, he travels continually, knows America from a thousand different facets, and loves it in a quiet, deep, unostentatious way. He is a great friend of H, the biographer. Like H, his ancestors have been in this country since long before the Civil War. He is attracted to the young German. By and by they are together in the drawing-room. The impeccable gentleman of New England, the country-man—intellectual of the Middle West, the happy woman whom the gods love, the young German, the quiet, poised Jew from the South. And over on the other side are the others.

Mr. L has just come in. Mr. L is a lion these days. My hostess was all of a dither when she told me on the telephone, “ . . . and L is coming. You know it’s dreadfully hard to get him.” L is a very powerful labor leader. “My dear, he is a man of the people, but really fascinating.“ L is a man of the people and just exactly as fascinating as my horsy, bank vice-president, on-the-make acquaintance over there, and for the same reasons and in the same way. L makes speeches about the “third of the nation,” and L has made a darned good thing for himself out of championing the oppressed. He has the best car of anyone in this room; salary means nothing to him because he lives on an expense account. He agrees with the very largest and most powerful industrialists in the country that it is the business of the strong to boss the weak, and he has made collective bargaining into a legal compulsion to appoint him or his henchmen as “labor’s” agents, with the power to tax pay envelopes and do what they please with the money. L is the strongest natural-born Nazi in this room. Mr. B regards him with contempt tempered by hatred. Mr. B will use him. L is already parroting B’s speeches. He has the brains of Neanderthal man, but he has an infallible instinct for power. In private conversation he denounces the Jews as “parasites.” No one has ever asked him what are the creative functions of a highly paid agent, who takes a percentage off the labor of millions of men, and distributes it where and as it may add to his own political power.

III

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

Best you don’t wait to speak out until they get to the Jews. 10… 9… 8….