Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

(credit for title to Virginia Bauman on Twitter)

Just a little over two weeks ago, September 21, I went on Facebook and posted a little tweet by Libertarian Party Chairman Nicholas Sarwark: “Nancy Pelosi is one of the most experienced House speakers of the last century. She’s only 70 votes short of an impeachment inquiry. She knows how to whip a vote. She doesn’t want impeachment. She wants a Democratic President to able to abuse the office like this one.”

And it got flak from some of my mainstream liberal Facebook friends, the kind of people who think that Nancy Pelosi actually knows what she’s doing. I was told “she also seems worried that an impeachment battle in DC will boost (Trump’s) approval ratings and help get him reelected. I really loathe to say it, but she might be right about that.” I said “the only reason she’s even Speaker is because voters wanted to put a check on this Administration.” I was told, “and what mechanism would stop him without awakening the beast and getting him elected again? The only thing that will work is get him out of office and try him for his crimes.”

You know, the same old scaredy-cat posture of learned helplessness, where Democrats assume that it’s better to do nothing than antagonize an enemy who’s already out to get them.

But what a difference a week makes, huh?

The Democrats are all, “What gives? The poll support for impeachment has closed the gap! It’s actually popular! We would have done this earlier if we’d known there was more support! What changed?”

And my answer is, “your party finally grew some balls.”

The flak I got was on the basis that there are certain rules that necessarily apply and can be predicted. The whole premise of Democratic passivity – which differs from but does not contradict Sarwark’s suspicion that Pelosi just wants the next Democrat to have Trump’s level of unchallenged power – is the naive assumption that Trump is just a mutation that will be resolved in the next cycle, and it would be better to just wait out the next election rather than antagonize the other party, which as we know, is going to be antagonized whether one does anything or not. This is of course based on the belief that there is going to be a free and fair election. In the fact of Donald Trump’s pressuring a foreign head of government for opposition research, it should be clear – even to Democratic leadership – that Trump has no intention of having a free and fair election, and neither does his Party. Thus, whether Pelosi wanted to or not, she had to act. And pretty typically, the Democrats only got off their asses once their own power and privileges were threatened.

And even more typically, Republicans use the same language that Democrats used during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, like what he did “doesn’t rise to the level” of impeachment and removal from office. Well, if perjury over sex rises to that level (so to speak) why does withholding military aid from a country under subversion from its neighbor – a neighbor that Trump just happens to have begged for opposition research in the past, and that he just happens to have handed intelligence from our allies while president – on the condition of a “favor” to research Ukrainian connections to a cyber-research firm that exposed Russian hacking of the Democratic Party and to research Hunter Biden’s connection to Ukrainian business NOT rise to the level of an impeachable offense? As far as the Party of Trump is concerned, the real scandal is that Burisma paid Hunter Biden 50,000 dollars. Sure. Eric and Donald Jr. are running a business that is clearly not a blind trust. Ivanka is attending meetings of NATO countries with her father. And her husband is running diplomacy with Saudi Arabia, when nobody in the Republican Party can tell us what Jared Kushner’s JOB is or what he is actually tasked to do. But sure, let’s get our undies in a wad over Hunter Biden and his FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Cause that’s the way you’re supposed to say it now. At least if you’re a Republican on TV. Loudly and righteously. As in, “I’m sorry your husband got shot, Mrs. Lincoln, but can we focus on the fact that Burisma paid Hunter Biden FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS??”

Thing is, as much as Democrats have cause to regret their bargain with Bill Clinton now (in this politically correct age when a grown man can’t manipulate a girl into sex in the privacy of his own Oval Office), they did at least get something out of it. He was popular. The economy was actually good. They got a lot of legislation done, and some people other than rich donors liked it. What exactly are Republicans getting by fighting so hard for Trump? Why is this fatty orange hill the one they want to die on?

On September 27, Trump twitted:

“To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN! “

Or, “I’m going to nitpick your misspelling of a word I made up, and I’m going to do so by exposing the fact that I can’t tell an apostrophe from an accent mark from a hyphen.”

See, this is why, even now, I find it hard to call Trump a Nazi. Not that he isn’t just that evil and racist. Not that he doesn’t intend to turn America into a one party thug regime. It’s just that he’s so fucking BAD at it. I mean, look at this, he can’t even do Grammar Nazi right.

And yet, this is the level of mastermind that Republicans think is presidential. And it always causes one to ponder the question, why is it that people who are NOT dumber than wet camel shit continue to worship someone who is? Well, I may have finally found the answer.

I have said, more than once and in more than one place, that the secret to Donald Trump’s political success is that Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump voter would be if they had money. Well, it turns out there is a new study out that makes much the same assertion, only with academic credentials.

It’s detailed in a recent article for The Atlantic, appropriately titled “The Most Dangerous Way to Lose Yourself.” Essentially, people will do certain things to preserve their sense of identity, even counterproductive things, if their sense of self is essentially negative. They may also display a certain amount of “team spirit,” like if you grew up as a Dallas Cowboys fan way back in the day and then Jerry Jones took over and the first thing he did was fire Tom Landry and every dumbass thing that happened to the team since proceeded from there, yet you still go along with what Jerry Jones wants because you’re a Cowboys fan, and what are you going to do, quit being a Cowboys fan?

But the article takes this sense of identification and goes deeper.

“Over the past decade, a new conceptualization has gained attention. It began with the seeds of an idea after the attacks on 9/11, (William) Swann says, in that the terrorists’ actions seemed to him to be driven by unusually powerful group identities. A willingness to die—and to kill thousands of others in the process—goes beyond simple allegiance. He reasoned that these people had essentially taken on the group identity as their own.

“Swann gradually developed the concept and deemed it “identity fusion.” Along with a collaborator named Angel Gómez, he defined it in 2009 as when someone’s “personal and social identities become functionally equivalent.”

“When people are fused, your personal identity is now subsumed under something larger,” says Jack Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale. One way researchers test for fusion is to ask people to draw a circle that represents themselves, and a circle that represents another person (or group). Usually people draw overlapping circles, Dovidio explains. In fusion, people draw themselves entirely inside the other circle.

“…By a similar token, pundits often chalk “radical” behavior up to pathology, or simply to a vague “mental illness” or religious or political extremism. But fusion offers a framework that involves an ordered thought process. It is thought of as distinct from blind obedience (often assumed to be the case in cults and military violence), in which a person might follow orders and torture a prisoner, either unquestioningly or out of fear for personal safety. In fusion, people become “engaged followers.” These people will torture because they have adopted the value system that views the torture as justifiable. Engaged followers do so of their own volition, with enthusiasm.

“…The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”

“…Fundamentally, fusion is an opportunity to realign the sense of self. It creates new systems by which people can value themselves. A life that consists of living up to negative ideas about yourself does not end well. Nor does a life marked by failing to live up to a positive self-vision. But adopting the values of someone who is doing well is an escape. If Donald Trump is doing well, you are doing well. Alleged collusion with a foreign power might be bad for democracy, but good for an individual leader, and therefore good for you. “Fusion satisfies a lot of need for people,” Dovidio says. “When you fuse with a powerful leader, you feel more in control. If that person is valued, you feel valued.”

Even if the identity fusion theory did not exist to describe the current phenomenon, we are clearly looking at a situation where Trump is where he is because a critical percentage of the country wants him there, and they want him there because they identify with him to a truly bizarre level. They think he “fights” for them, even when that just means he’s telling them what they want to hear. (When ARE we going to lock Hillary up, anyway?) They think he’s one of them because even though he isn’t, in broad measure he is – an aristocrat whose crassness means he has never been fully accepted as such, someone who despite his background shares many of the beliefs of “flyover country.” A man whose persecution complex and inflated sense of victimhood almost approaches that of his fan club. And to the extent that he doesn’t share their beliefs, he knows that his survival depends on telling them what they want to hear, even when they themselves know he’s lying.

This is why people who are by no means stupid end up becoming Trumpniks. In a certain sense, they’re self-programmed. And now, these people believe in Trump under the impression that he’s invincible, not realizing that the reason he’s been untouchable is because his “base” has made it politically unprofitable to confront him. What they also don’t realize – or don’t care about – is that growing numbers of Republicans in the Congress are retiring, because some of them are not victims of identity fusion, they just know which way the wind is blowing. And without a party in Congress, it is that much less likely that the Republican Party will get anything done. What exactly are “conservatives” fighting for, if all they’ve got to fight for is Trump? If a Party consists only of Trump and his ever-changing moods, is it even a political party?

It’s like a dog that chews a bone and tastes the marrow. He chews even harder and breaks the bone, splintering it. The marrow comes out and he chews even harder. The splinters break his gums. He fixates on the taste and digs in deeper, not realizing he’s tasting his own blood.

It really is a sort of faith. There is a critical difference between “conservatives” (read: Trumpniks) and Christians, however.

At the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that even Peter would betray him three times before the cock crowed in the morning. After the Romans arrested Jesus, Peter was recognized by a servant girl, but he denied knowing Jesus. She asserted “he is one of them (the followers of Jesus) but again Peter denied it. At one point, Peter was spotted by one of the High Priest’s men, and again he denied knowing Jesus. And at that point the rooster crowed.

Whereas over the past three years, Republicans have learned more and more about how ungodly their Leader is, and how much his position as leader makes a mockery of their claims to piety. And still, none of the party “leadership” will speak out against him, and the redcaps in social media are if anything more defiantly supportive than ever.

So congratulations, conservatives. You’ve proven that you’re more loyal to Trump than you are to Jesus.

Somehow I don’t think this cult will last as long, though.

To the extent that there is a real difference between Donald Trump’s fan club and the pre-Trump Republican Party, Trumpniks tend to share leftists’ and libertarians’ disdain for America’s perpetual military commitments overseas. So a lot of otherwise anti-Trump people saw the new president’s disdain for war and neo-conservatism as a silver lining in his election. And then he hired John Bolton to succeed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, when Bolton was one of the architects of the Bush Administration’s Iraq invasion, the exact sort of neocon adventure that Trumpublicans are supposed to be against.

During his tenure (starting April 2018) Bolton did indeed clash with Trump on a lot of foreign policy issues, even if he reinforced the Trump team’s hawkish stand against Iran. As it turned out though, Bolton had the right take on Trump’s dovish relations with North Korea, pointing out that the North Korean regime was testing new strategic missiles, countering Trump’s statements to the contrary.

But, according to the usual Beltway gossip, what actually killed this marriage made in White Trash Hell was Bolton’s objections to Trump’s secret negotiations with the Taliban on the month of the 9-11 anniversary. Said conflicts may have prompted Trump to announce that the hitherto unrevealed negotiations were being cancelled, allegedly on the grounds that the Taliban had killed one of our soldiers, as opposed to all the other days when they aren’t trying to do so. And while Trump apparently wanted to spring this as a stunt to convey the message that he was standing up for our troops, the rest of Washington got the opposite message from the fact that the Taliban were even invited to Camp David. The former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, told The New Yorker: “We basically turned on the government, (we’ve) said, ‘It’s your fucking fault that we’re losing.’ ” He said that the optics of shaking hands with people still killing every American soldier they can are “mind-boggling” for the U.S. military, too. “The Pentagon would be in a fury: you kill our soldiers and get invited to Camp David.”

I mean, yes, we basically have to cut bait in Afghanistan, but the Trump Administration position seems to be just as optimistic as it is with North Korea: we withdraw all our forces and trust that the Taliban will peacefully co-exist within the elected Afghan government. And if you believe that, Henry Kissinger has a Nobel Peace Prize he’d like to sell you.

My friend Don looked at this week’s news and told me, “the White House has a turnover rate worse than a McDonald’s.” I said, “Donald Trump is like the guy who goes to the counter at McDonald’s and says, ‘I want to speak to your manager.’ And the counter boy says, ‘Sir, you ARE my manager.'”

But in the wake of all this, our accidental president has told us that he’s going to have a new National Security Advisor next week. Clearly the challenge (as seen with both Bolton and McMaster) is to have somebody who can get along with Donald Trump and still present himself as a persuasive figure on the world stage. And if I may presume, I think I have the perfect candidate for the job.

Gary Busey.

As we know, Gary Busey and Trump go way back, with Busey appearing on two seasons of Celebrity Apprentice in the last decade, before Trump left the “reality TV” business to develop a more lucrative career by screwing the country as a politician. The two men are also fairly similar politically; indeed, Busey actually preceded Trump in showing that you could still have a career after proving to be mentally unhinged.

And actually, as a government official, there would be quite a few points in Busey’s favor.

I’m pretty sure that Gary Busey is at least as qualified for diplomatic work as John Bolton.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un seems to have a real affinity for eccentric extroverts.

The post of National Security Advisor does not require Senate approval. Which is good, because even Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell might gag if he had to bring Gary Busey on the floor.

And Gary Busey always has an ambitious, positive approach to the world, which would be a contrast to Donnie and his Resting Trump Face.

But you might say, “wait.” You might say, “James. Isn’t Gary Busey, like, actually brain damaged?” And I say, So? Was anybody who voted for Trump afraid of a little brain damage? Would brain damage be a problem for working in this Administration? I would argue that it’s a plus. At this stage, what person in their right mind would work for this Administration? The last two National Security Advisors were dignified, rational men. And Donald Trump has shown us that he does not care for rationality or dignity. Fortunately, Gary Busey has left rationality and dignity far behind. He already has a rapport with Trump, and besides, anybody who voted for Trump clearly wanted a government that “works” like Celebrity Apprentice, so you might as well just admit it.

What is that remaining hesitation you have? You know what that is? That is FEAR. And do you know what FEAR is? FEAR is False Evidence Appearing Real. You know who said that? Gary Busey. And if you can’t trust Gary Busey, you can’t trust ANYBODY.

The Conservative government of Great Britain, prior to the resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May, had declared that, deal or no deal, they are going to leave the European Union on October 31. This position was arrived at by party insiders and “hard Brexit” advocates including Boris Johnson, who has since become Prime Minister (in an internal Conservative Party vote). Having gamed the opportunity for the power to enforce his policy, Johnson as Prime Minister has since rapidly cemented his reputation as a Donald Trump who can actually speak English.

In an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Brexit is no longer very popular, Johnson first decided to “prorogue” Parliament for five weeks to forestall debate on the terms of departure, which is legal by parliamentary rules but alienated members from all parties, including some Conservatives. Perhaps as a result, Johnson lost not one, not two, but three votes before the suspension of Parliament, with the House of Commons first voting to pass a bill requiring approval for a no-deal Brexit. A vote to pass the bill on second reading succeeded the next day, and Johnson’s request for a general election failed to pass a vote. Several Conservatives voted against their own party on these measures. Johnson attempted to enforce party discipline by threatening dissident Conservatives with expulsion, only to have many members call his bluff, resulting in the ouster of several, including not only Mr. Soames (Winston Churchill’s grandson) but Johnson’s own brother. Even before that, his parliamentary majority consisted of only one vote, and with the purges, that majority is now gone.

And yet, because of that parliamentary setup (which makes the chicanery of American politics seem simple and easy to follow), there is still a chance for Boris to come out on top. This is the thesis of Andrew Sullivan’s latest weekly column in New York magazine. Sullivan is an old-school (C)onservative who knew Johnson back in the day, and he believes that a general election will be called in response to Johnson’s gambit (although not necessarily on his terms) and that this will in effect be a second Brexit referendum. “This time, the choice will be starker than in 2016: a no-deal Brexit or staying in the E.U. And this week, by firing the dissenters, Johnson has succeeded in making the Tories the uncomplicated “Leave Now” party. By clearing up any confusion, Johnson will thereby stymie the threat to Tory seats by the Brexit Party, which stormed to victory in the recent European elections. … And that is a Tory strength, as it stands. Just before Johnson won the leadership, Labour and the Tories were roughly even: around 26 percent each. Right now, the Tories have recovered under Johnson, as Brexit Party voters have come home, and have a clear ten point lead over Labour: 34/24 percent. The Brexit party still has 13 percent. Now that the Tory position on Brexit is the same as the Brexit Party’s, they form a no-deal bloc of 48 percent of the vote. The unabashedly pro-Remain party, the Liberal Democrats, have 18 percent, the Greens 5 percent, which added to the Labour total, gives the anti-no-deal bloc a total of 46 percent. It’s still close however you look at it.” Sullivan sums up: “Johnson has a clear case: that he stands for respecting a democratic vote to leave the E.U., that his opponents are elitists trying to defeat the will of the people in favor of a foreign entity, the E.U., and that Jeremy Corbyn cannot be allowed into Number 10.”

Yeah, I’m not so sure. It is quite true that Labour leader Corbyn, simply by being Corbyn, has miraculously squandered the immense advantage he has in the unpopularity and fecklessness of the Conservatives, since in this environment, he could have been the Prime Minister now. It is also true, as Sullivan says, that Labour itself is feckless, largely because it has never been as strong in support of “Remain” as the Conservatives are in support of “Leave.”

Way back at the time, I had said that the results of the Brexit referendum (in which 37% of Labour voters backed Brexit) indicated that there is a substantial group of people that rejects the closed-off, neo-liberal, “globalist” establishment, and that in the case of the Labour statistic, this group isn’t limited to right-wingers. I had also said that the Brexit vote (in the summer of 2016) could be a warning to those who think they know what “the people” want and what’s best for them. And this turned out to be the case. Trump got elected president, and we have had alt-right parties gain success in Germany and elsewhere. And the fact that the anti-establishment sentiment is actually a common cause of both the nationalist Right and the socialist Left means that an anti-globalist policy isn’t necessarily a reactionary and racist position. Nobody thinks that Jeremy Corbyn is a racist. Unless you’re Andrew Sullivan.

The problem, especially in the cases of the US and the UK, is that discontent with mainstream liberalism doesn’t mean that the conservative wing of the country knows what it’s doing, and since they don’t, people have to live with a government that is both malicious and incompetent. Which means that the conservatives currently in charge have to present themselves as the last defense against Evil Socialism, when all they have to recommend them is malice and incompetence. Now, we’ve seen that this is actually the selling point for the Trump Administration, but in the case of Brexit, it may not be enough, especially because of that unacknowledged Labour influence on the Leave vote.

Sullivan’s bet is that people are more sick of Corbyn and the Left than they are of the Conservatives, but the history of Brexit itself undermines the case. The referendum was first proposed by then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, because he was actually in favor of remaining in the European Union under re-negotiated conditions, but was pressured by hardline Conservatives and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The Brexit referendum was intended as a defense of the moderate, negotiated position, and when the Leave vote won, Cameron resigned his seat. This is how Theresa May became Prime Minister. She herself had supported Remain, but felt obliged to uphold the Conservative position that a Leave vote meant that the government should enact a plan to leave the EU. After almost a year in office, having previously said there would be no general election, May made a “surprise statement” announcing a snap election to seek support for the Conservative position. As a result of the 2017 election, the Conservatives actually lost seats, and while Labour failed to capitalize, the Conservatives needed to form a coalition with the hard-right Unionist Party of Ulster to keep their majority. The main reason May’s government held up as long as it did is that it took this long to build up a consensus for a successor.

The pattern thus far has been that Conservatives want to promote a policy which is both controversial and has a real level of support. In order to bolster support, they use the election system in the hopes of increasing their majority and reinforcing a mandate for the policy. And the end result causes them to lose seats and by implication, support for the policy. This was the case with Cameron’s referendum, it was the case with May’s snap election, it has been the case with Johnson’s parliamentary votes, and there is no reason to believe that that will not be the case with another snap election.

Why? It might have been a lot easier if the people who are always going on about enforcing the choice of the Leave voters actually had any sort of plan to do so. If they’d had any sort of time table to work within a deadline, as opposed to setting a deadline and hoping somehow a time table would come to them before then. If they’d considered that they still had to work with European Union negotiators who now have that much less reason to deal with the Conservatives. If they’d considered the other practical consequences of their policy, namely the fact that the United Kingdom still has a land border because of Ulster, which means that a “hard” Brexit could restore a hard border with Ireland since the two nations will no longer be in the same economic community, and the economic and social consequences of that could lead to the result that British foreign policy has been trying to prevent ever since the Irish state was founded – the loss of Ulster and the reunification of Ireland.

This leads to another point. It has been said that a crucial advantage of the Right in politics is the idea that they don’t want more government. They have an advantage over the Left in that the Left does want more government, so gridlock is usually to the advantage of the Right. This also applies in political terms, because the average voter who isn’t concerned with political affairs or “social justice” takes the current situation as the given and is often suspicious of anything that would change that, even an ostensibly good reform proposal. But in this situation, it’s the Conservatives who are the radicals. In his column, Sullivan quoted a pro-Brexit blog using the phrase “By Any Means Necessary” with a picture of Malcolm X. “When a Conservative Party cites Malcolm X as a role model, it seems safe to say it is no longer conservative in any serious meaning of the word.” Which again would not be a bad thing if the proposed reform were actually good and it were not in fact destructive to the current order, with no real benefits. I return once again to the example of our “conservative” party in America, which wailed and moaned about the “radical” agenda of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (which had its antecedents in the pro-market Romneycare of Massachusetts and a Ron Bailey article in Reason magazine) and when the ACA was the new idea being forced into the system, it was easier to make a case against it. But by the time the Republicans actually got a Republican president who would sign one of their numerous repeals of the ACA, it was clear that they didn’t have anything to replace the ACA with. Which was bad enough. But in the interim, enough people had gotten real benefit from Obamacare that we had to consider the consequences of going back to the status quo ante, which would have cut a lot of people off from medical coverage. In the current situation, the radical and destructive position is to remove the “socialist” (actually business-oriented) reform of the ACA, and if people had actually wanted to go back to the prior standard, it would not have been changed in the first place. Republicans have not succeeded in repealing the ACA, despite valid criticisms of the program, because they don’t have a better idea, and everyone knows it.

Likewise, despite real support for the idea of leaving the EU, Conservatives have not been able to capitalize on that, because they don’t have a real plan other than “crash out” by default, which has consequences that no one really wants. Sullivan’s thesis is that Labour is sufficiently unpopular (and disorganized in its own priorities) that Johnson’s government will prevail anyway, which discounts the point that the Conservatives are the ones endorsing the radical and destructive policy. It discounts the point that in this context, all that the Labour-led opposition needs to do is to endorse the default status quo. To endorse the policy of not changing. You know- the conservative position. There’s also one factor here that doesn’t exist in America, which is that the flexibility of parliamentary politics means there actually IS a viable third party in the UK, called the Liberal Democrats. They have some things in common with Conservatives on economics, but are basically like the old Liberal Party that existed before the Fabian Socialists of Labour took over the opposition to the Conservatives. The LibDems might not be socially conservative enough for some Tories, but they provide a real choice to those who want an alternative to Conservative whackery and the socialist whackery of Labour. Which again provided an escape valve for Johnson’s internal opposition and allowed them to call his bluff. Even Sullivan says, “if Labour were to win, or go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, they could keep the U.K. in the E.U. without appearing to be acting directly against the wishes of the people. Or they could hold a second referendum. Either way, some kind of resolution would happen — and through a democratic process like a general election.”

In any event, the parallels continue: if the original Brexit vote was a sign that the liberal establishment was not invincible, the three years afterward have demonstrated that for the Right to actually take advantage of that and create positive change, they have to have a plan to do so. The problem has been that they don’t have a plan to do so, because at heart, they don’t believe in positive change. This has already had bad results for the “conservative” movement, despite the weakness of the Left, and that lack of foresight will continue to undermine them in the future.

It was announced on Friday August 23 that David Koch, former Vice President of Koch Industries, had died. It is unknown which physical ailment ended up killing him, but apparently he had more than one. But David and his brother Charles were best known for applying their vast wealth, and influence with other wealthy people, towards the libertarian movement, which has had a broad degree of influence on right-wing politics without actually taking over the Republican wing of America’s duopoly. In particular, the Kochs fund Reason Magazine, which I’ve always considered to be a fair and useful information source, even if it is sometimes “glibertarian.”

He had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to public television, museums, and cancer research, especially after his own cancer diagnosis. Even Mother Jones had enough regard to mention this side of his public life.

The Reason obituary has an interesting little remark where Brian Doherty implies that Koch’s reason for his limited engagement with third-party politics was mostly practical: “In the 1980 presidential campaign, when recently imposed campaign finance restrictions hobbled third parties’ abilities to fundraise by severely limiting how much any single donor could give, David Koch took advantage of the fact that the rules allowed candidates themselves to self-finance as they wished: He became the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee. He and running mate Ed Clark got more than 1 percent of the vote, a party record that would go unbroken until 2016. ”

In a certain respect, Koch was ahead of his time, preceding billionaire Ross Perot’s self-funded celebrity campaign for president 12 years later. Of course neither Koch nor Perot gamed the system as well as Donald Trump, who did the same thing with politics that he did with his private career: run up huge tabs and expect the creditors to pay for them.

Doherty had previously quoted Koch in his book Radicals for Capitalism, where he said that after the 1980 campaign, he saw politicians as “actors playing out of a script.” From that point, the Kochs took the conventional route for wealthy men in politics: hiring the actors to play out their scripts.

Not only had the Koch Brothers supported numerous rising conservative lights like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, they had disavowed the rising populist Tea Party movement. David Koch had repeatedly said that while he had sympathy to the Tea Party movement, he’d never been approached by their people and had no involvement with it.

As Ron Howard might say, this is not entirely true. One of the more developed exposes of the Koch political network was Jane Mayer’s 2010 article for The New Yorker, and it pointed out, for one thing, that one of the organizations within Americans for Prosperity (a group founded by David Koch) had hosted an anti-Obama event in July 2010. Peggy Venable, an organizer for the July summit, was at the time an employee of Americans for Prosperity and had also been part of other Koch-funded groups. “And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.” Mayer also quotes former Reaganite Bruce Bartlett as saying ““The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

This premise of control is a consistent theme with the Kochs. I’d already pointed out that as part of their need to preserve their fossil-fuel based industrial empire, the Kochs are among the primary deniers of anthropogenic climate change, to the extent of fighting both state and private initiatives for green energy. Their secrecy in regard to their activities includes their denial of interviews to most journalists, including Mayer. In the case of Doherty, Mayer quotes David Koch’s comment to him: ““If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

Anybody who actually read Atlas Shrugged knows that in that book, the government was not so much the main enemy as the enforcer for people like James Taggart who used their influence with government to preserve their privileges by force. In a certain respect, both libertarians and socialists are right: Big Government AND Big Business are the enemy, because Big Government usually acts at the behest of Big Business. Which is why I would count the Kochs as libertarian-sympathetic but not entirely a good for libertarianism: The premise of libertarianism is the release of controls on the individual – from public OR private authorities – and the mindset of the Kochs is the mindset of control freaks.

It is this need for control that undermines not only libertarianism in theory but libertarianism in practice and perception, as for all the genuine charity and socially progressive policies of the Kochs as individuals and as company representatives, they are far more exercised in harnessing government than restricting it, and their influence has been far more concentrated in removing restrictions on their business (regulations and ‘progressive’ taxes) than on individuals (with, say, the fact that one of our country’s main businesses is the prison industry). In their case at least, “liberty” primarily means the right of a corporation to do whatever it wants without consequences or concern for the environment (either the literal environment or the culture). And there is a reason why liberals always use the Koch Brothers as their go-to, Captain Planet-villain-caricature of what all libertarians really are, because the Koch Brothers are really like this.

It’s akin to the “Faustian bargain” that the Good Christians (TM) of the conservative movement made with Trump (and secular Republicans before him), except that they’re actually getting something out of it. They’ve got Mike Pence as Trump’s backup, they’ve got a whole new class of religious conservative judges on the bench, and they’re aligned with Trump’s policy to criminalize migration into this country, which most libertarians (including the Kochs) oppose. And while Paul Ryan did give the donor class that big tax cut, the benefits of that are being eaten by Trump’s trade war. This may be why Charles (whom I’d always regarded as the more sensible brother) started pulling his lobby away from active endorsement of the Administration.

In that regard, I posted this bit on my Facebook page from a Facebook site called Progressive Libertarianism –

which captioned it, “President Donald Trump, the central planning socialist.” And this got a slight amount of blowback from “progressive” friends who gave me the standard defense that socialism is something other than the authoritarian system that was implemented by every country that actually calls itself socialist or a “People’s” government. Which is ironic for two reasons: one, the Facebook page was quoting Judd Legum, a liberal journalist formerly at Think Progress. Which leads to the second point. Liberals, the issue is not whether you agree with the assertion that socialism equals authoritarianism. The post is challenging the assertion and acting on it. If you are a libertarian or conservative and you actually believe that authoritarianism, especially command of the private sector, is a characteristic of socialism, and you support Trump as the counter to socialism, you need to wake the fuck UP.

Just as the point of challenging libertarians is not whether I believe in the leftist assertion that libertarianism is just another wing of conservatism that seeks to ban abortions so that we can fill the maternity wards and the Koch Brothers can eat the babies. The point is whether libertarians should present a position that justifies that impression among people who aren’t on the Left.

There are at least two ironies in the Koch political trajectory: One, as Jane Mayer pointed out, the Kochs’ philanthropic and political roles created certain conflicts. “For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.” In the same respect, the Kochs’ alleged respect for libertarianism not only discredited the movement politically, it actually worked at cross-purposes. The best way to create a libertarian movement would have been to divorce it from the patronage of either political party. The path the Kochs took, to entwine themselves that much more deeply with the rest of the Right, actually worked against liberty, especially in their support of a populist movement that led to the likes of Sarah Palin, and then Trump. If, as Bruce Bartlett says, libertarianism was never that popular anyway, how popular was racism before the astroturf grass-roots movement? Which movement is an actual danger to democracy and which is ascendant in the “conservative” party today?

The real punch line is that the closest thing you’ve got to a grass-roots concept in American politics nowadays started with Bernie Sanders’ small-donation network, creating a path for politicians to be less dependent on the donor class, and making it more likely that real change will occur through the leftist movements that the Kochs regarded as anathema.

The example of David Koch – and why he deserves neither unqualified hatred nor praise – is an example of someone who knew better. He and Charles Koch were part of the foundation of libertarianism as an organized political movement, and they had the choice to present an alternative to the two-party system. They chose to join it, and support it. We are living with the consequence of that choice today.

There’s a few things that have happened in current events that have a common thread- either implicit or explicit racism. About a week ago, Viceroy Donald Trump twitted against liberal (and black) Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland, referring to his district in Baltimore as “rat-infested” and going on to say that black people were “living in hell” because of Democratic politicians like him.

I think this is one of the areas that I can sort of agree with Trump, actually. The last time I was back East with my brother and my aunt and uncle, my brother took me on a drive through central Baltimore, while on another day, my uncle took me through the more suburban-style neighborhood where he and my aunt grew up. And when I was with my brother, I was looking around, and going, “I hear they call this place Charm City. It sounds like they’re overcompensating for something.”

You might as well call it, “Baltimore: The City With A Nice Personality.” Or, “Baltimore: The Camera Adds Five Pounds.”

I think to some extent, Trump is trying to appeal to people like my family back East, who were born and raised in Baltimore in the old days but for various reasons moved out. My brother was a surgical assistant years ago, and he spoke very highly of Dr. Ben Carson when he was at Johns Hopkins. Well, Carson, as Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wanted to have a press conference in Baltimore defending his boss on July 31, but attempted to stage it on a church property, which asked them to leave, because they hadn’t sought prior permission. A technicality, to be sure. But I don’t think the church would have been so eager to enforce the rules if they had seen association with Dr. Carson, or any association with this Administration, as a positive.

I’m pretty sure Trump doesn’t care. The political incentives of our “two” party system are such that there is little reason for Republicans to seek common ground with Democrats and every incentive to antagonize them, with Trump in particular hoping that he can get just the right people in just the right states to win the Electoral College votes he needs to repeat his 2016 victory. He is also betting that the same polarization will oblige liberals to move in the opposite direction and thus alienate the center, which liberals have been more than eager to do, with candidates at the first set of Democratic debates enthusiastically endorsing the idea of decriminalizing border crossings, which most Americans are not on board with. That is why the strategy has worked so far, and why Republicans in general prefer Trump to the more inclusive approach recommended in their 2012 “post-mortem” after Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. For their part, Democrats have yet to figure out that if you’re only allowed to vote for one of two parties in this system, that makes them the default NotRepublican Party, which means that in addition to all of the self-consciously woke “progressives”, they have to get the votes of all the other people who are not leftist, including people who might otherwise be Republican if not for the Party’s current attitude.

The flip side of that is that while Democrats risk alienating people who could vote for them, the problem with the Republican approach is that there was a surprising number (as in, above zero) of black and Hispanic people who voted for Trump, and who share the generally conservative, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ethic that used to define conservatism. But “conservatism” is no longer defined by such ethics, or any ethics. As I’ve said, in the Republican Party, it no longer matters how anti-tax, anti-abortion, or pro-Israel you are. All that matters is if you can predict the color that Donald Trump says the sky will be today. And Donald Trump, by both temperament and cynicism, has chosen to divide the country rather than unite it, and in this he not only threatens to alienate white people who have those old conservative values more than they are alienated by the Democrat Left, he has already made it clear that people like Dr. Carson are anomalies in a party that has chosen to antagonize black and Hispanic people, which means that such people will become even more rare in the Republican Party, and such people who still had a place in it will leave.

The current position of the Republican Party on race is that much more critical given another bit of news from the last week. On July 30, The Atlantic had an article about a tape just released from the archives of the Nixon Library, where President Nixon had a phone conversation with Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California in 1971, discussing the United Nations vote to admit the People’s Republic of China, and Reagan referred to the African delegates, saying, “those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Which of course got a big laugh from Nixon.

Look: I liked Ronald Reagan. To some extent, I’m willing to say that I still do. But I wasn’t blind to the problems with his Administration or the Reagan Republican Party in general, so my reaction to this is “disappointed, but not surprised.” After all, Reagan had Lee Atwater as an advisor, and Atwater, as a plotter of the infamous “Southern Strategy” was that much worse. But in the Atlantic article, Tim Naftali, a historical expert who helped review the National Archives tapes and recommended their release, said: “This October 1971 exchange between current and future presidents is a reminder that other presidents have subscribed to the racist belief that Africans or African Americans are somehow inferior. The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public.”

Just as the demographic of NotRepublicans intersects with but is not subsumed by the demographic for woke progressives “of color”, the demographic of NotDemocrats is not – or was not – synonymous with actual Klansmen and other white nationalists. Reagan and even Nixon knew this. Mr. and Mrs. America might have felt threatened by people who didn’t look like them, but they weren’t motivated by hate, and they weren’t on board with the other aspects of the racist movement, which is basically neo-fascist. I would dare say that Reagan’s comments are more consciously racist than Trump’s, since Trump is barely conscious of anything, but by the same token, Reagan was conscious enough not to base his appeal in racism. It was “Morning in America”, not “American Carnage.” Plus which, if you wonder why anyone liked Reagan, we were coming off a Carter Administration with double-digit inflation and interest rates, with both our economic and foreign policy in crisis. In fact, it makes me question the judgment of Trumpniks who act like Obama was the “worst president we’ve ever had” (especially since some of them voted for Obama once). The economy and foreign policy under Obama had problems, but not nearly so much as with Carter. Reagan could appeal to a large number of people who thought the country was on the wrong track, but those people weren’t just the white nationalists. And this also meant that however much people like Reagan and Atwater might have agreed with racists, they didn’t try to exclude the rest of the country, because they needed the rest of the country. Trump tries to exclude the rest of the country because the Republican strategy (not just under Trump) has been to cater to the people who come out and vote no matter what, and to find legal barriers to discourage votes in minority neighborhoods and demographics like young college students. Put another way: Whatever their feelings, Reagan and Nixon did not align with outright racists because it did not make political sense. Hell, in 1999, Donald Trump refused to endorse a Pat Buchanan presidential campaign, saying: “He’s a Hitler lover. I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy. And maybe he’ll get 4 or 5 percent of the vote and it’ll be a really staunch right wacko vote.”

And now Donald Trump, and the rest of the Republican Party, align with that vote because it does make political sense.

Two more points on the subject of Reagan: First, anyone who thinks Reagan is bad hasn’t read what Winston Churchill said about Mahatma Gandhi.

Second, we didn’t actually KNOW how racist Reagan was toward black people until Trump became president.

I’m just saying.

In any case, the racism of people who are long dead is not as consequential as the encouragement of racism in the here and now. This Saturday August 3, a 21-year old from Dallas shot up a Walmart in El Paso, killing (at this count) at least 20 people with at least 20 more hospitalized. The murderer, whom I am going to refer to as the Asshole in El Paso, was identified by authorities as the author of an anti-Hispanic essay online, and referred to the mass murder at a New Zealand mosque. And last Saturday, the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California was attacked by a shooter who left his own online statement asking people to read a book from 1896 called Might is Right, endorsing “Social Darwinism” and a pseudo-Nietzchean ethic.

And just this morning, (shortly after 1 am) another shooter attacked the nightclub district in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine (including his own sister) and wounding at least 27 before being shot down by police. We do not know if he had the same “alt-right” motives as the Gilroy shooter or the AIEP.

I am personally skeptical of how much gun laws can do to reduce these situations, especially since, as in the case of the Dayton shooter, investigations of the weapons used reveal that they were purchased legally. Guns don’t kill people. Psychotic assholes who want to kill people kill people, and guns are just the most efficient way to do so. We don’t need gun control as much as we need psychotic asshole control, and unless we develop precrime technology, I don’t see how that’s going to happen.

But that raises the question: What is creating all the psychotic assholes?

I took time out of my Sunday to see Bernie Sanders give a town hall meeting at Cheyenne High School in North Las Vegas. Now, I don’t agree with everything Bernie says. Or even most things. Like, in this event, he said that health care is a right (I don’t agree) and that the “health care industry” is not designed to provide all Americans with health care in a cost-efficient way, but is designed to maximize profits for the insurance and drug companies (which is a lot harder to argue with). But the reason I followed his campaign in 2016 and why I remain interested is that he, much more than Donald Trump, actually is a threat to business-as-usual politics in this country, and that includes the mindset that politics is a business. In that regard, one of the points Sanders made today is that not only does the Senate need to return to session to take up gun bills already passed by the House, the country needs to confront the influence of the NRA on American politics. To the extent that there is a public consensus for gun control – and there has been a movement since at least Sandy Hook – it is stymied entirely by a Republican Party which in this one case is that much more synonymous with a private lobby, and because the NRA is technically more a private industry lobby than a political action committee, its priorities are that much more commercial. But to boost the gun industry, the NRA has a similar emphasis to other conservative media: you are a beleaguered individual opposed by an entire political wing out to destroy your way of life, and the only way to deal with Those People is to have a gun.

This has little to do with the Second Amendment per se, especially since the NRA in Governor Reagan’s day actually supported gun control, at least as long as it involved the Black Panthers. As with the Republican Party’s effective embrace of white supremacy, it is a mutual dynamic of their audience turning to a more radical agenda and the institution responding by becoming more radical in order to bolster itself. Either way, the culture becomes more bigoted and violent because certain people want it to be more bigoted and violent, and they want this because they see a benefit to them that they did not see before.

So if you want to change the laws that allow these sorts of things to happen – or you know the laws don’t matter as much as changing the political culture that encourages these things to happen – then you know what to do.

And you know what day next year you need to do it.

Well, Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally delivered live testimony to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, and now one thing is clear: The reason he wanted the printed Mueller Report to speak for itself is because Robert Mueller isn’t very good at speaking for himself.

All the liberal talking heads on networks like MSDNC were saying that Mueller’s testimony on TV was necessary because people needed to actually hear him say what was in the report rather than having to read it. So much for that. Most of what he said was variations of “I refer you to the Report.”

Not like it matters. All televised congressional hearings are exercises in grandstanding, but as is usual these days, Republicans were that much worse. With their shouted delivery and all their change-the-subject conspiracy theories, the Party of Trump acted like they were the ones being put on trial. Which in a way, they are.

But I go back to a point I’ve made at least once: There is a clear distinction between the government’s Rules as Written (the Constitution) and the house rules everyone plays by, mostly for the convenience of the two-party system running the government. The government hasn’t been run by Rules as Written in a long, long time. And what we saw today is another aspect of a government that is in danger because it gives more and more power to the Chief Executive as though he were a Roman Emperor, regardless of whether that Emperor is Trajan or Nero. And the reason for that is that while the Rules As Written place the Congress – in Article I of the Constitution – as the center of the system, Congress as it exists now is a collective exercise in dodging responsibility.

Republicans wanted Mueller to say – as William Barr did – that there was No Collusion (TM) and their Leader has a clean bill of legal health because they don’t want to take the responsibility of voting no on the impeachment of a president who is not only unpopular but (for some reason) widely perceived as crooked as hell. Democrats wanted Mueller to indict Trump for them because they don’t want to take responsibility for pushing an impeachment knowing that Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell will slam it down in the Senate and then turn around and help Trump milk that for all it’s worth.

As I’d said: Even if there was no specific standard prohibiting the Justice Department or one of its agencies from indicting a sitting president, that would mean that the Party of Trump could whine that the president was being brought down by an unelected institution, and for once they would have a point. There already is a mechanism for the government to investigate and try a criminal or unfit president. That mechanism is impeachment. It is not Robert Mueller’s place to do Congress’ job for them.

And again: not like it matters. Because almost despite Mueller, Democrats got the legal pieces they wanted. Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler asked Mueller, “the president has repeatedly claimed your report found there was no obstruction and completely and totally exonerated him. That is not what your report said, is it? ” Mueller said, ” Correct, not what the report said.” Longtime Trump foe Ted Lieu (D.-California) asked Mueller, ” I would like to ask you the reason again that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC opinion stating you cannot indict a sitting President, correct?” Mueller responded, “That is correct.”

But another one of Nadler’s lines of questioning was actually strengthened by a Republican. Colorado Republican Ken “The Schmuck” Buck tried to grill Mueller, saying, “You made the decision on Russian interference, but when it came to obstruction of justice, “you threw a bunch of stuff at a wall to see what would stick.” “I would not agree with that characterization at all,” Mueller replied, adding he believed he could not charge Trump with obstruction, because of the Office of Legal Counsel’s determination that a sitting president could not be charged. Buck pressed on this: “Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?” Mueller said, “Yes.”

“You believe you could charge the president of the United States with an obstruction of justice after he left office?”

“Yes,” Mueller said again.

In the immortal word of Ben Stein: “Wow.”

I always found it ironic that the people who most oppose teaching Darwinian evolution in school are not only the biggest advocates of Social Darwinism in politics but the biggest examples of Darwinism in action.

So because Mr. Mueller was constrained not only by his professional ethics but the directives of William Barr’s Department of Justice, he would not do Congress’ work for it. He would not do the math for them. But it was left to a Republican to define the point: if this were anyone else, they would have been prosecuted. Ergo, there is enough evidence in the Mueller Report for Congress to start an impeachment, since Republicans were certainly able to impeach Bill Clinton with less. I agreed with them then that there was cause to impeach on obstruction of justice, and the Republicans’ new messiah makes Slick Willie look like Albert Schweitzer.

Your move, Speaker Pelosi…

“Fox News and Breitbart have done to our parents what they said video games and Marilyn Manson would do to us.” -Internet meme

“It’s easy to fool people when they’re fooling themselves.” -Mysterio, Spider-Man: Far From Home

The phrase “reality-based community” was, tellingly, first meant as a pejorative. During the George W. Bush Administration, journalist Ron Suskind spoke to a Bush White House insider who said “guys like me [Suskind] were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This sort of attitude led to a backlash among liberal critics of Bush, who started calling each other “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community.”

Of course the implication of such a comment is that the Bushie in question (assumed by many to be Karl Rove) was aligning himself against reality. But the Bush Administration were a sober council of sages compared to the Trump Administration and the “conservative” movement, which at this point is less a political party with a voter base and more a voter base with a political party. If they define themselves in opposition to their opponents, the modern Party of Trump are clearly proud members of the fantasy-based community. And I find it a bit ironic that many of these folks are older people who now get most of their information from AM radio and Fox News, and these are the same people who told me as a kid that listening to heavy metal and playing Dungeons & Dragons was going to destroy my sense of reality and ruin my life.

Even so, the other reason that ‘reality-based community’ is a pejorative is the secondary implication that people of a certain background are no more prepared for reality than the conservatives. You see this in the often hysterical reactions of liberals to the corruption of Trump government and their deliberate flouting of “rules” that were mostly created by liberals for the benefit of liberals. They see Trumpniks acting like they didn’t say what they just said and accuse them of “gaslighting” or attempting to destroy their own sense of reality. In truth, Trumpniks and other conservatives could care less about brainwashing liberals, because they could care less about liberals.

Only people who have access to the same information pool as everybody else but doubt the objectivity of reality have any reason to fear “gaslighting.” I have sometimes been accused of having the attitude “everyone else is an idiot except for me.” Well, the last few years of “gaslighting” from various sides have only made my self-concept stronger than ever. In some respects liberals are no more fond of objective reality than “conservatives,” it’s just that since they were in charge for so long, that their assumptions about reality were easier to take for granted, and their conflicts with reality are not as violent as those of conservatives. Or, Stephen Colbert was wrong when he said “reality has a liberal bias.” It’s not that reality has a liberal bias. It’s that conservatives have a bias against reality.

The human psychology needs fantasy. Fantasy expands our sense of the possible. And this is a major advantage that conservatives have over liberals. Liberal Democrats only operate in terms of the existing structure without seriously trying to change it. They’re the ones who keep saying, “politics is the art of the possible.” For conservative Republicans, politics is the art of the impossible: either forcing some idea that should not work or ought not to be tried (like a state abortion ban that defies Roe v. Wade) or simply preventing Democratic or bipartisan legislation that would have been possible before they made it impossible. Republicans don’t think in terms of the existing terrain. They seek to shape the terrain. They go beyond what is accepted, and don’t care if anyone says “that’s impossible” or “that’s evil.” The problem is that defying conventional wisdom means that you don’t care if your idea really IS impossible or impractical.

In some cases, fantasy is an expression of despair. It is an emotional assessment that reality is never going to get any better. According to studies after the 2016 election, 9.2% of people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. A lot of people, through no fault of their own, are not doing well in this improving but weak economy, essentially the same economy that they used to attack Obama but are now praising under Trump. They look at the world, in some cases through media that get a lot of hits from sensationalism and conflict, and see their country in decline and the things they took for granted slipping away. And they see Republicans doing nothing about this and some Democrats actively assisting this process. For them, reality is the enemy. Anybody who is “realist” is the enemy. They have given up on sensible politics and want the razzle-dazzle of grievance and revenge fantasy.

A certain element of hypocrisy is of course at the base of this but what we are seeing in the Trumpnik is a deeper and far more active commitment than simple hypocrisy. Most of our basic “beliefs” are simply a collection of learned behaviors and impressions that don’t necessarily go together, for example “I am a good Christian” and “I like big butts, and I cannot lie”. It is very easy for most of us to be hypocrites. But when one’s hypocrisy is pointed out, most of us respond by either changing outward behavior to correct one’s public image, or, perhaps unconsciously, change inner motivation to match one’s self-image. In the short term at least, the Trumpnik does neither. When confronted with evidence of his self contradiction, rather than change his position the Trumpnik carries on and refuses to acknowledge the contradiction.

Perhaps the primary example of this psychology in fiction is in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Winston Smith is brought in to be interrogated by O’Brien of the Inner Party.

“An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.

‘It exists!’ he cried.

‘No,’ said O’Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.

‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’

‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’

‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.”

Orwell called this “doublethink.” Liberals call it “gaslighting.” I call it “trying to have it both ways.”

The genius of this is that the alternative-to-being-right are, within their own camp, far more efficient at brainwashing than Orwell’s Inner Party. For O’Brien to destroy Winston’s mind, he had to completely control his perceptions and subject him to prolonged torture. But Trumpniks, with access to the same reality and information as the rest of us, happily brainwash themselves.

This is how Ben Shapiro can (accurately) say that “facts don’t care about your feelings” and say this in service of a movement that is built around the motive “my feelings trump your facts.”

Another aspect of this psychology is what is commonly called tribalism. Ayn Rand:

“If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live?

Obviously, they will seek to join some group—any group—which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group—they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices—so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.

This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called “ethnicity.”

So, when Trump says that the judge in a civil case against him is necessarily biased because he’s (a US citizen) of Mexican heritage, this makes perfect sense to him; the idea that a judge has to review the facts in a case that may not favor Trump is less a reality than “Mexicans are necessarily bad.” For the Trump-rationalizing Christian, rather than the logic being “I am a good Christian because I believe X things”, the Trumpnik says “whatever things I believe are right BECAUSE I am a Good Christian.” The Party member can say “Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia” one day and then “Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia” the next day and back again the day after that because the point is loyalty to whatever the Party wants you to believe at the moment, not bourgeois legacies like “facts” and “reality.” The true believer resolves the threat of self-contradiction by remaining loyal to some greater good like God or Country or the Party, no matter what external contradictions present themselves as a consequence. The problem however is that the individual’s loyalty is still subjective, and the external contradictions still exist. When we talk about faith in God, which God are we talking about? And when we talk about faith in Trump… which Trump are we talking about?

I’d talked to one person on social media who said that she voted for Trump and was doing so again because he isn’t a Republican OR a Democrat. Which is in a way true. But try telling Republicans that. I have mentioned more than once that to understand Trumpism, you have to figure out how Trump can get the support of both David Duke and Sheldon Adelson. Duke is an arch-anti-Semite. Adelson is an arch-Zionist. They can’t both be right about Trump. Either Trump is lying to at least one of them, or, far more likely, they are both lying to themselves about what Trump really wants.

I remember back when Jon Stewart was still hosting The Daily Show, and wondering if President Obama was some kind of “Jedi Master” playing 3-D chess with his opponents and we couldn’t see the whole strategy. Well, as it turns out, Mitch McConnell is a lot better at strategy than Barack Obama. But Obama at least had enough intelligence that you could justify projecting him as a super-genius. To project Trump as a super-genius requires a lot more effort on your end.

And projection is what this is all about. To a given Trump supporter, Trump is just as much a blank slate for their aspirations as Obama was to liberals, only that much more so because the disconnect from reality is the whole point. Trump allows them to believe that Mexico will pay for the wall, or gravity makes things fall up, or 2 plus 2 is the square root of 13, and to say that these assertions are lies and fantasy is to miss the point, because to these cultists, who see reality as the enemy, Donald Trump is the living example that bullshit works. Donald Trump has proven his entire life that you can lie throughout your entire career, indeed, that your entire life can be a lie, and you can still get away with it and even prosper.

Republicans who are not necessarily true believers simply assume that Trump has some magic power to avoid social sanction, blanking out the point that they give him that power by rationalizing, and thereby tacitly approving, his actions. Trump doesn’t care that white nationalists explicitly endorse his agenda, because “a lot of people agree with me.” Presumably a lot of people who aren’t white nationalists.

I had mentioned a while back that if Trump announced tomorrow that he is a woman undergoing the process of transition, then every Republican in Congress would fight for a pair of garden shears to be the first one to castrate himself on the grounds that masculinity is now “gay.” I can say this because they have done the equivalent of such on a repeated basis. The latest twitstorm, where Trump told non-white American Congresswomen to “go back where you came from” is simply the latest example. We already see after just a few days that the storm is blowing over and Trump’s rating with Republicans is actually increased, because the respectable cloth-coat Republicans have gone to the floor to come up with more polite wording, to complain about the alleged anti-American and anti-Semitic positions of “progressive” Democrats, to say that Trump was referring to anti-Americanism in action rather than asserting that if you’re of a certain bloodline you can’t be American. It is an attempt to convince the outside world – but especially oneself – that we didn’t all see what we just saw.

I mean, up to a point, the more well-spoken Republicans had done a decent job in creating a distinction between Trump’s racism towards the Democrats and legitimate critique of their positions, but then when Republican spinmeister Kellyanne Conway was interviewed by reporters on the subject, she referred to the Democratic “Squad” as “the dark underbelly in this country” and when reporters asked which country the women were supposed to back to, she asked one of them, “what’s your ethnicity?” Oh, so now we’re playing “I’m not racist, I’m just questioning your worth on the basis of your ethnic origin.”

At this point to deny that Trump is a racist is to not only defy reality but to defy the English language. It is to assert that vowels are a Socialist plot and consonants are all Muslims out to destroy Christianity.

This is the issue with living on faith as opposed to facts. The argument is that faith allows us to tap into the universal values from some supernatural realm outside the subjectivity of human fashions and politics. But in practice faith itself is a subjective value, and the sacred texts are subject to interpretation, and sometimes that interpretation is called “crusade” or “jihad.” But at least the sacred texts exist as a matter of record. When the focus of your faith is a demented, elderly man-baby with the attention span of a fruit fly on meth, it becomes that much harder to find a stable value. If you wish for a leader who will “provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means”, then you would get more stable guidance as a henchman of Two-Face or the Joker. Rather than defending an eternal set of values and expecting their leader to conform to it, Republicans hold their Leader as the standard of value, which is consistent only in its negativity. And the practical consequence of that is that no matter how much Republicans claim to not be a stupid and racist party, their actions brand them as The Stupid and Racist Party, because that’s what Trump and his pack of jeering redcaps want, and without those people, Republicans won’t even have the shrinking voter base that they do now.

Which gets to one more aspect of living in the fantasy-based community. In abstract philosophical terms, Trumpniks seek to deny reality, but in practical terms what they want is to dodge responsibility.

Even this week, when the redcaps at a Trump rally chanted “Send her back!” at Ilhan Omar, they thought “that’s what Trump said!” And when Trump was called on it, he was like, “well, that wasn’t me, that’s what the crowd said!“

Trump in particular has coasted most of his life by threatening things without having to go all the way. He wants the benefits of a social arrangement without having to truly commit to it. Just ask his ex-wives. Why do you think he never has locked Hillary up? Because it would attract too much attention from people who would see he really did want to establish fascism in America. Like, Chuck Schumer might use harsh language or something.

The Trumpnik wants to assert that he can chant at the rallies without being a willing servant of evil. That one can align with a declared racist without being a racist, because after all, Hillary would have been worse. That he can align with a movement that wants to ghettoize women, dissidents and minorities without declaring his allegiance against his own friends who may be women, minorities or people who disagree with that movement.

Again, more sensible Republicans had played this “having it both ways” strategy in the past and it had worked to a point. The architects of the “Southern Strategy” may have been racists, or at least willing to use racism for political purposes (which may be even more cynical) but racism or white supremacy was not the be-all and end-all to them. Racism was a means to an end. The old conservatives aimed to control government to accomplish certain greater goals, like protecting this country from Russia.

Well, the redcaps like Russia, and prefer Putin’s society to contemporary America. Racism may have been a means to older conservatives, but to the Party of Trump, it is the end in itself. Older conservatives may have wanted government to enforce certain policies like fiscal conservatism, but to the Trumpnik, government exists only to inflict suffering on the people they hate. And in Trump, they have a dealer who gets high on his own supply. Because he craves attention and adulation even more than racism, he says the most evil and disgusting things in public because he knows it will get attention, and his movement, which is much less a political party than a fan club, eggs him on and responds in an even more evil and disgusting manner, knowing that this will get a rise from Trump’s enemies, who they see as their enemies. And in this hatred, they reinforce their own us-against-the-world romance.

But even if these guys got their Whites Only America (or an America where only white men had the franchise), climate change is parching the fields, threatening the coastal cities and causing “freak” storms to be less and less freakish and more and more common. Anthropogenic climate change is a fact, and it is exacerbated by the policies that Trump and his cronies want. You can’t wish that away, or use the magic power of government force to change the consensus and say that consensus dictates reality. The Russians had a government that declared that political consensus was reality. It got them Lysenko, pollution, declining birth rates and Chernobyl.

And even in “consensus reality” actions have consequences. You can’t retain the “soft power” of America as leader of the free world if you hate freedom at home, persecute asylum seekers and show in your foreign policy that your government under Trump is at best completely unreliable and at worst, Putin’s gimp. You can’t treat the queer community and non-whites the way the Nazis treated Jews and Slavs and not expect them to mobilize against you. You cannot align yourself with hate without provoking hate in return, any more than you can devour your cake and still have it in front of you. You cannot create some sort of Kantian distinction between the phenomenal realm of your morality as demonstrated in action and the noumenal realm of your self-assigned virtue and good intentions.

And that is because the rest of us are not living in a magical land of dogma and wishes. We are living in the real world of actions and results.

The longer this Tijuana Donkey Act of a presidency goes on, the more pathetically obvious it is that it continues only because the Republican Party wants it to, which means that the longer this goes on, the more they, not Trump, are the issue. Third-party voters, independents, and Socialists who align with the Democrats purely for practical reasons do not have the same illusions about the duopoly as establishment Democrats, but if they want to avoid becoming a “third” party themselves, those Democrats need to realize that the Republican Party has declared war on them and respond appropriately, if they want to retain their own power and privilege, which is of course all that they care about.

And if they don’t, we still have a largely non-partisan structure of judges and law enforcement agencies that is continuing to investigate not only Trump but some of his acquaintances. The “deep state” (which prior to Trump was simply ‘the state’) let these people indulge themselves because they were not really a threat to the system, but as they have continued to abuse the privilege more and more, more and more people are realizing how much of a threat they always were.

You cannot declare yourself to be at war with reality without reality striking back. You cannot say “the rules don’t apply to me” – or even worse, “your rules don’t apply to me, but my whims are law for you” – without abandoning reason and civilization. At that point all you have is force and fraud, and that boils down to who has the biggest gang. And the whole reason for “conservative” demographic fear is the inner realization that they are not the biggest gang, and have not been for a while. And if Republicans thought things were bad in 2018 when they lost the House, continuing to antagonize the rest of the country will make things that much harder for their Party in 2020 and for Donald Trump’s legal position whether he gets impeached or re-elected.

Of course, that’s the ultimate example of Trumpniks wanting it both ways. They want their boy to be Jesus, but you can’t really be Jesus until you’re crucified.