Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

I mentioned at the end of my last post that such success that The Party of Trump has had thus far, and such strength as they still hold after the midterms, is because they are doing a better job with asymmetrical social warfare than the Left, even though in the 60s and 70s, that sort of thing was the Left’s stock in trade. But in the big picture, this shouldn’t be surprising.

If there is anything that the leftist “progressive” and right-wing reactionary have in common, it is a shared contempt for the establishment in both its classical liberal and social democrat faces, the kind of people who run things in Washington, New York, London and the EU Parliament. The all-powerful club to which nobody that we know belongs. But that club is generally more sympathetic to liberal-left concerns than social conservative or nationalist concerns. Those people feel very keenly outside the system and are more willing to work outside it or even tear it down than the “Democratic Socialists” who might get a foot in the door through conventional politics.

That explains why more AM radio talk-show hosts know Rules for Radicals than the average Antifa protestor.

You may ask, what is Rules for Radicals?

Exactly.

Rules for Radicals (ISBN 0-394-44341-1) was written by Saul Alinsky in 1971, shortly before his death. Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer (like Barack Obama…) who wanted to set down the rules he came up with for community activism.

If anything, this book seems to be more popular among the American Right than the Left. I say this because when I looked for it’s entry on the Amazon website, there was at least one right-wing answer book, like How to Trump SJWs: Using Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ Against Liberals.

It kind of makes sense. The fact that somebody on the Left actually did create a how-to handbook for cultural subversion appeals to the paranoid sensibilities of right-wingers who are convinced that everything they don’t like is a plot by George Soros or some other elitist handing down marching orders and strategies. (Even as all the leftists who act like the Koch Brothers go to monthly strategy meetings with David Duke, Montgomery Burns and Count Orlock are convinced that all THEIR ideas are completely organic.)

Now, Rules for Radicals is available for cheap on Amazon and a few other places, but I didn’t want to wait for a copy and I don’t want to subscribe to Kindle. Fortunately I discovered it is available on archive.org. https://archive.org/stream/RulesForRadicals/RulesForRadicals_djvu.txt So I’ve been looking at it.

To start, there’s the Prologue, where Alinsky says, among other things: “There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski (sic) said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude towards change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.”

Well, here we are.

Going into the first chapter, “The Purpose”, Alinsky makes his statement: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

After some discussion of morals versus dogma, this leads to the chapter “Of Means and Ends.” This goes into several rules that Alinsky defines for the ethics of means and ends, such as: “The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”

Rules for Radicals goes on at great length on various subjects, but in terms of my point – how Alinsky’s approach is relevant to various times, and how the Right has (deliberately or otherwise) absorbed it more thoroughly than the leftists for whom Alinsky wrote the book – I want to focus on the section called “Tactics.”

Alinsky starts by saying: “Tactics means doing what you can with what you have.” As with “Of Means and Ends,” this chapter is organized by a list of rules, which I will go over in turn with regard to how they are applied by the “alt” right in general and the Trump team in particular.

Alinsky starts the list with: “Always remember the first rule of power tactics:

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

Certainly Trump didn’t have any real power before getting into politics, but more than one person has pointed out his similarity to P.T. Barnum, the difference being that the discolored circus freak he is hustling is himself. He did a great job of presenting himself as being more financially competent than he actually was, and in this country, people think that being rich means that you’re competent, whereas in Great Britain or Czarist Russia, it was commonly understood that anyone with money usually got it by being an inbred upper-class twit. And even though everyone in the press knew Trump had gone bankrupt at least six times, he still projected himself as someone who knew what was going on, and the Clinton Democrats couldn’t call him on it. Partially because of the rules that follow.

“The second rule is: Never go outside the expertise of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the expertise of the people, the result is confusion, fear and retreat. It also means a collapse of communication, as we have noted.

“The third rule is: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.”

Well, it’s not like Trump has technical expertise in, uh, anything, but he really is great at making other people act outside their expertise. That’s how he won. He ran for the Republican nomination and once he got it, he got elected because his opponents didn’t know how to react to his attitude. They still don’t. I mean, he could say “two and two is five” and you could say two and two makes four, and he would go “fake news.” How do you counter that?

(I mean, besides taking his obvious ignorance at face value and subjecting him to the same deliberate shunning and contempt that the media usually reserves for third-party candidates. But apparently nobody thought of that.)

“The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

“The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

This dynamic is one of Trump’s strongest traits. He is not a “radical” in the leftist sense, but he is outside the (generically liberal) establishment. To the extent that he had a grand strategy, it was the realization, shared by Bernie Sanders, that he didn’t stand a chance of promoting his national agenda outside the two-party system. He was an “outsider” in the sense of being outside the Republican political system, but not so much of an outsider that he was going to go third-party. And once he got the Republican nomination, the “rules” suddenly turned to his benefit since now he was representing a (once) respectable part of the system, and by two-party binary logic, anybody who didn’t like Democrats had to support him, no matter their objective qualms. That became much more a factor once he became president. Democrats and others can’t really stoop to his level if they want to preserve the system of rules and norms that they had previously lived under. This also means that as good at Trump is at applying ridicule, it’s harder to turn such tactics against him. Partially because he’s already ridiculous yet still has a support base. It is nevertheless true that however impotent his opponents may be in the political arena short-term, ridicule still serves to serves to infuriate him and throw him off.

“The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

(Corollary) “The seventh rule: A tactic that goes on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.”

This is pretty clearly demonstrated in the playful, unserious dynamic of Trump with the audience he has at his various rallies. He says various stupid and belligerent things, which in the short term at least serve only to tweak liberals and other eggheads, which both he and the audience enjoy. This can indeed go on too long, but boredom with a tactic assumes both a capacity for imagination and a capacity to realize that it has gone on too long with no practical reward, and that is hard to do if you, like both Trump and his stereotypical fan, have the attention span of a fruit fly.

“The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”

This goes along with the general principle of changing things up so that the opponent cannot adapt. Trump, as seen, is very good at this. The non-Trumpers are not so good at this. And as Trump continues in his official role, he and his marginally more professional staff are beginning to adapt to the methods of the establishment so that they can prevail, as they eventually did in crafting a “Muslim ban” that the Supreme Court could live with. This also means that the only way of countering this dynamic is for the opposition to learn its use against Trump. That should be easier now that Democrats have a House majority that they can use to start official investigations of Trump malfeasance, but it’s clear that they don’t have much appetite for pressure tactics even when they have the resources to apply them.

“The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

Where Trump is concerned, this is usually simple bullying. It’s how he’s gotten most Republicans and even establishment Democrats to go along with him. But it works both ways. According to recent reports, Trump had wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI head James Comey but his White House attorney Don McGahn persuaded him otherwise, on the grounds that he could suffer “a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.” The upside to dealing with such a negative personality is that he makes his own weaknesses obvious.

“The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results from the reaction of the opposition that are essential to the success of the campaign. It should be remembered not only that the action is in the reaction but that that action is itself the consequence of reaction and reaction to the reaction, ad infinitum. The pressure produces the reaction, and constant pressure sustains action.”

“The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard enough it will break through to its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky gave an example from his own history where one corporation that he organized against took the step of breaking into his house and obtaining keys from that home to burglarize Alinsky’s place of business. Nothing of monetary value was taken in either burglary, only records applying to the corporation. As Alinsky put it, “the corporation might just as well have left its fingerprints all over the place.” That being the case, Alinsky told them that they would be confronted with that crime and others before a US Senate Subcommittee. “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”

It should be obvious how this principle applies to Trump. He wins by being so obviously negative and shameless about it that it’s redundant to call it out. The problem with “pushing the negative hard enough” is that in his case the fan club is consistently devoted, but the less devoted are dropping out. We are seeing the results in the Democratic turnout for the midterms.

“The twelfth rule is: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying ‘You’re right – we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”

As I’ve been saying, this has been the issue with the Republican Party, not just Trump, all along. For all their attacks on the Democratic establishment, the Republican Party outside Trump has utterly failed to provide a constructive alternative, and the result was that when the pressure campaign ultimately achieved the desired result – a Republican takeover of government – they failed to deliver on their promises. The result was what we got with the midterms. The problem with not having a constructive alternative is reduced somewhat with the Trumpniks, because they never cared about constructive alternatives. They are in fact so “radicalized” against the establishment in both major parties that they’ve gone all the way to nihilism. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it in this week’s analysis, “Will (Trump’s policies) accomplish anything except chaos? Hell, no. But chaos is what Trump voters asked for.The press has steadfastly refused to understand this aspect of Trump’s pitch. The subtext of his run wasn’t about making America great again. It was, Let’s fuck shit up. If Obama voters understood “change” as a genuine call to idealism, Trump voters understood it as a chair through a plate-glass window, the start of a riot. In a time of extreme cynicism and existential gloom, Trump is a doomsday cult, giving voters permission to unleash their inner monster. What makes this dangerous is that the appeal isn’t limited to racists. It extends to anyone who’s pissed off about anything. Trump is the match to burn it all down.”

The flip side, as Taibbi’s statement implies, is that not everybody who voted for Trump was a racist. But neither were all of them nihilists. Some of them actually expected a constructive alternative and didn’t get it. As I said in the last post, the conditions of statewide Senate races are such that the culture-war appeals of the Trumpniks are more likely to work than in Congressional District races where politics actually is local. That’s why those tactics still worked for maintaining the Senate lead but failed to hold the House.

Or, as I keep saying, the lesson of the 2016 election for the Democrats was that if making liberals cry was the only thing that mattered, then Trump would have won the popular vote. Some of them seem to have figured that out by now. But what Republicans still haven’t figured out is that Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote, because the rest of the country knew that making liberals cry wasn’t the only thing that mattered.

“The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

At this point in his book, Alinsky goes into a great deal of elaboration. But in terms of how the point applies to the alt-Right, let alone the radical Left, it’s arguably the first rule that applies, not the last.

Alinsky admits that in a complex society, it is difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama think in terms of a complex society. But Clinton never won any national races (and lost her first attempt at the Democratic nomination) and Obama’s record in addressing America’s long-term issues is in retrospect mixed. Whereas if you single out a target that people can personalize and identify – like Bernie Sanders did with “the billionaire class” or Trump does with whoever put a hair up his ass this week – you have much greater results. In Alinsky’s critique, which remember was meant to be applied by the Left, “all issues must be polarized if action is to follow.” There is no room for middle ground. The fact that reality is not actually all black-and-white doesn’t help the struggle. For reasons of both emotional commitment and intellectual focus, the conflict must be simplified, even by those who know better.

This is how both Sanders and Trump were able to cast themselves primarily as enemies of each party’s establishment at least as much as enemies to the opposing party. It didn’t hurt that both of them actually were a bigger threat to each party’s establishment than they were to the opposing party.

Again, in the broader sense, Trump wins insofar as he can reduce everything down to culture war. He loses when Democrats can turn public attention to other matters. But here’s how old-time leftist radicalism flips around to inspire its reactionary opposite.

I’ve been looking at a few “conservative” sites and the general theme of the bloggers and commenters is that they’re under siege from the PC Left, “Cultural Marxists” and Islamists, who they must know are not all the same thing, but they all seem to be threatening the American Way of Life. (Remember, bringing up complex reality mucks up a good narrative.) But some of the more reflective bloggers, like Rod Dreher, are making the point that the Left, especially at colleges, are that much more prone to black-and-white morality than any Ayn Rand fan. The reason that this country could survive with Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims all in one mix is that legally we weren’t supposed to let religion intrude on civic policy, and in turn that situation allowed everyone to coexist. Now (again, in these conservatives’ minds) leftists are trying to enforce a situation where people with “traditional” beliefs are unwelcome, passed aside for job promotions, shouted over when they speak at universities, and so on. And a lot of the Left’s success in the social arena, particularly the tactic of “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it” can be traced to the thoughts of Saul Alinsky and his peers, even if not everyone on the Left has a deep grasp of the intellectual heritage. It’s not enough to say that the opposition is wrong or mistaken in their premises. They have to be Objectively EVIL. Alinsky is in fact explicit about this:

“The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 1 1:23). He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act.”

So if you’re not on the Left, and you see these guys kicking your ass in the social arena over and over again, and you already feel yourself to be in a “minority-majority country” (because not even all white people agree with you), you start looking for how this came to be and you consider the tactics that the Left used to switch from being the “Have-Nots” to the “Haves.” You recognize that despite all your money, power and White Privilege (TM) you are on the outside where it counts, and you do what the original merry pranksters did- use the enemy’s rules against them, and break their script, because then they won’t know how to react. And this really all comes together when the guy who, despite his money, fame and privilege is definitely an outsider in the Cool Kids’ Club, Donald Trump, shows up. And then everybody is on board with the same polarized strategy: Fight back and make liberals cry.

But the Right, in being so scared of the subversive Cultural Marxists that they were willing to sell their souls to beat them at their own game, didn’t just prostitute themselves to the Bizarro-Ray version of Bill Clinton for the sake of winning elections. They decided that winning elections and grasping political power was more important than all that stuff they wanted to gain power to preserve, like Christian morality. Or the Constitution. And now it’s starting to slip away, because some people are finally starting to pay attention.

It is of course the fault of the Right if they want to take all the wrong lessons from other people’s example, but it was the Left that gave them the intellectual tools to shift the terrain.

If you guys on the Left are still wondering how the Right keeps beating you, it’s because they’ve been stealing your material since at least Mussolini, and you still haven’t caught on.

Well, if there was a Blue Wave in the midterm elections, it crashed right up against a red wave, as it turned out that the huge increase in midterm votes, including early voting, accrued to both major parties. So while at one point before Republicans got themselves all hot and bothered over Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats thought they might get the Senate back in addition to the House, they ended up losing seats there, even though at least two races in Arizona and Florida are still up for grabs, but late returns are also projecting that Democrats will pick up at least 38 seats.  Still, despite things going largely their way, Democrats complain about the Senate results because the states where the contests occurred had roughly 12.5 million more Democratic than Republican votes.

I mean, not long ago, Democrats were complaining that they couldn’t win a majority due to the Electoral College, and they were complaining they couldn’t win House seats because of gerrymandering, and now they’ve gotten a better win percentage with House seats than with Senate seats (where neither gerrymandering nor the Electoral College come into play) and they complain that’s un-democratic too.

If you’re a Democrat, you look for excuses for why you can’t win elections. It’s what you do.

The thing is, I don’t really think the Democrats did anything wrong.

They were told not to make everything about Trump, and to focus on the kitchen-table issues. And that’s what they did. Most of the Democrats who won talked about how they emphasized health care and how Republicans had tried to undermine it. Andrew Gillum (Florida governor candidate) and Beto O’Rourke (Texas candidate for US Senate) made much of the media attention they were given and emphasized running positive, substance-based campaigns.

Trump is the one who made the election All About Trump. Partially because that’s what he does, and also because with that mostly empty gumball machine he calls a brain, he knows it works. But the end result just confirms the conventional wisdom about the results: He exacerbated the process by which Democrats regained the House and lost more seats in the Senate. And the reason for that dynamic is that you have local House races where the constituencies are more cosmopolitan (i.e. Not Trumpnik) whereas statewide Senate contests where rural counties are in play are more prone to the Trumpnik rhetoric of “We’re the Cowboys and They’re the Redskins” (choice of team metaphor is completely intentional).

There’s also the point that where one house has 435 seats and the other has only 100, maybe a third of which are in contest during any election, each individual Senate contest is more consequential and small numbers of losses are harder to recover from.

So the fact that results ended up as most experts predicted means that any pundit (either left-wing or right-wing) who wants to draw some moral lesson from all of this is confounded by the workings of a federal system that doesn’t correspond to the way most people think politics works. “We shoulda won the Senate cause we got more votes! We have a fascist moron as president when Hillary got more votes!” Well then, you need to look at how things work and do something about that. Indeed, the very fact that most midterm elections don’t have anything like this year’s level of turnout implies that a lot of voters weren’t aware of these factors.

In observation of results, I do think some things need to be done on various levels. First, the process of voting itself needs a severe overhaul. And unfortunately, I believe that the only way that can happen is to federalize the process in the same way that the Post Office and various other “local” institutions are actually federal. And the most obvious reason for this is that the various state bureaucracies that are in charge of delivering sample ballots, compiling ballots, making sure that electronic voting machines are plugged in, et cetera, are the same bureaucracies that are themselves under election, and in one case, one of the candidates who benefits from a dysfunctional voting system is not only running for higher office but is the official in charge of running the election system. Given that we’ve already had several constitutional amendments and legal precedents establishing that there IS a right to vote, and that the federal government can step in to protect it, we need to address the point that there is not an equal right to vote when one constituency has state of the art voting machines in an easily available polling place and the other one has old-time machines run out of Uncle Zeke’s General Store and Town Hall.

But if your real complaint with the election is that it doesn’t do enough to reverse the dominance of Donald Trump, that requires a broader approach, dare I say a meta-political approach. This is a matter I’d been discussing with people on social media.

To address the subject of Trump’s success, I theorized: Why is Trump winning? Partially because he has the initiative. Why does he have the initiative? Because he sets the agenda. Why is he able to set the agenda? Because he doesn’t just accept the political given. For example, with the recent immigration/caravan/birthright citizenship controversy (which of course has evaporated now that he confirmed the Senate), do you think it matters to Trump that he can’t just wave a magic wand and say “I have repealed the 14^th Amendment because I am the President and only I get double scoops of ice cream”? No. The point is to make it a subject of discussion. The point is to make the unthinkable thinkable. Because we have seen a pattern where Trump will spew some Dadaist nonsense and his various Republican enablers will feel obliged to translate it into real legislation. Because that is, after all, what a legislature does: It exists to translate political initiatives into working legislation.

This Thursday, conservative Ramesh Ponnuru was on one of the talking-head shows on MSDNC, and he pointed out that Trump and the Republicans have engaged in a fairly successful media strategy to demonize and delegitimize the Mueller investigation, because with the actual process of any House impeachment and Senate trial being a matter of political consensus and collective will, they have to put the matter in the court of public opinion in order to shrink even the concept of impeachment. Similar to how the “Dream Team” did with OJ Simpson, they put the prosecution on trial instead of the defendant. Well, maybe we should put the actual defendant on trial. That doesn’t mean you have any legislators initiate an impeachment, at first. You’ll notice that apart from the likes of Devin Nunes, there wasn’t an organized Republican push to kill the Mueller investigation even though there were some trial balloon opinions on the subject. The point was that the various whisper campaigns in friendly media were undermining the legitimacy of the investigation in the public’s eyes, at least with that substantial plurality that is loyal to Trump, such that people who would otherwise support a lawful investigation feel compelled to oppose it out of team loyalty.

Several scholars have pointed out that impeachment is really more of a political process than a legal process. There has to be a real consensus behind it, and that consensus is what neds to be built up before the work is done. Currently any Democrats and non-Republicans who push impeachment have the burden against the Republican Senate consensus that will surely block them. The goal, before any actual impeachment is drawn up, is to put the burden on those senators and make their defense of Trump politically unfeasible. The fact that it can’t happen now is irrelevant. Do you think that Republicans cared that all the repeals of Obamacare they passed were going to be vetoed by Obama? No. The point was to keep the issue out there until they got the president they wanted. Of course the problem in that case was that once the Republicans got the president they wanted they couldn’t even pass an Obamacare replacement that they could agree on, but that’s because they’re incompetent morons. Whereas Democrats are often politically incompetent, but they’re not morons.

But part of what I mean when I say that Democrats are politically incompetent is precisely that they don’t understand this principle. They only operate in terms of the existing political landscape where Republicans seek to change the terrain. Democrats wait for a consensus for action instead of forming the consensus and then taking action. If you’re going to say, “well, there’s no point in talking impeachment because we’ll never get enough votes in the Senate” then it will never get done. That doesn’t mean you barrel through without a consensus. You get the consensus and THEN get it done.

In that regard, there’s another idea that I’d like the press to try. I know they won’t, for the same reason that TV networks won’t stop playing Christmas ads WHEN IT’S STILL MORE THAN A WEEK FROM THANKSGIVING. But the idea is: Boycott Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean that they don’t cover the various scandals that he and his crew have created for themselves. On the contrary. Focus on those scandals but refuse to talk to him.

None of these press scrums where the reporters and Sister Mary Elephant Sarah Sanders play “you pretend to tell us the truth and we pretend to believe you.” Nobody interviewing Trump on the lawn on the way to the helicopter. Nobody at Trump’s rallies roped off for him to point at, so the redcap audience can jeer at them like a staff of Court Jews.

Seriously, from their perspective, most administrations (not just Trump’s) are in an adversarial relationship with press corps “gatekeepers”, and Trump took to Twitter early, so he’s already got a means of communicating directly without their medium.

Supposedly, in the wake of Trump yanking Jim Acosta’s press credentials, this has already been debated by some but networks are afraid of making themselves the issue. “Don’t give him ammunition?”  Like he isn’t going to make an issue of it anyway.  That’s why he baits the press in the first place. If, as some concern trolls insist, “(Jim Acosta) and Trump almost need each other to sustain a mutual narcissism”, then the more responsible party needs to break the cycle.

Go ahead. Go ahead and let the little baby whine and stamp his feet. Go ahead and let him piss in the corner and cry. It’s not an election year any more, what’s he gonna do?

I’m pretty sure Fox News wouldn’t go along with it, but then the purpose of Fox News is to appeal to those whose minds are already made up.

(Side joke: What’s the difference between Fox News Channel and Pornhub? Pornhub has fewer blowjobs.)

This is part of the larger goal in reversing what Trump has done. What Trump has done is to legitimize his approach to the world. And the press was enabling him all the way. At first because he was a reality TV star. Then because he was the Republican nominee. Now because he’s the president. In any case, if we were dealing with somebody who didn’t have Trump’s reputation and fame, if he announced a presidential campaign by stating that Mexicans were rapists and drug smugglers, the press would have treated him like a mutant retard unworthy of their attention. You know, what they do to Libertarians. What we need to do is treat him like that. Not withstanding the fact that he actually is the most important man in the world now, the point is to make it clear that he does not hold his position legitimately. In my opinion, Trump won the election fairly (by the terms of the Electoral College) but since then has done everything he could to invalidate his status, and the only reason he hasn’t been impeached is because no other president (including Nixon) has abused the privilege this much.

And when you’re dealing with someone who’s that much of a solipsist, removing media attention takes away his validation. In a certain respect, it may make Trump doubt his own existence. Trump doesn’t mind being in an adversarial relationship with the media, it’s what he lives for. But to have no relationship with them at all? How long could he go cold turkey?

Shift the terrain. Gaslight the gaslighter. Take his mic. That’s how you start fighting back.

Overall, it occurs to me that Trump and the alternative-to-being-right are doing a much better job of asymmetrical social warfare than the media leftists who are supposed to be good at it. In fact, I find a lot of parallels to what’s happening in a certain bit of radical text. I’ll get to this in my next post.

The early voting ballots for Nevada finally came in the mail this week.

Thank goodness. Now we can finally start getting this over with.

In my previous ballot analysis for 2016, I’d gone over reasons why I ended up voting for Gary Johnson for President but Democrats for most of the other races. In this election I’m just going to go ahead and vote Democrat for all the races. Even though Libertarians are actually in some of them. This is a tough decision.

I have already stated that in the short term it may be necessary to vote in Democrats strictly to tip the balance back, but in the long term that won’t be enough. I had also said during the 2016 elections that the main goal in voting third-party is not so much to make Democrats lose as to make the Republican candidate come in third. In Electoral College terms, if you’re going to be a “spoiler” then you want to aim to spoiling the greater of two evils, whichever you perceive that to be. Liberals will never forgive Libertarians who voted for Gary Johnson, since third-party votes in 2016 were enough to swing the election in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and even conservative North Carolina. By the same token, if the Electoral College means that the president is elected on a state-by-state basis, I could only vote for president with regard for how my state would go rather than the national vote total, and as it turned out, the number of people in Nevada who voted for Johnson was enough to keep Donald Trump from getting that state, and it was also enough to keep him from getting Colorado, New Mexico and even Minnesota. This is why I refuse to apologize for voting Johnson in the first place.  But at the same time, I did vote nearly all Democrats down ballot in 2016, because I did know that the vote in those cases had a direct effect on the result that it didn’t have in the Electoral College system, and I knew that the margins were close enough to matter. I can still support going Libertarian in the current circumstances if the result for a non-presidential election will end up causing the Republican to come in third. According to the most recent polls in FiveThirtyEight, that may be the case in New Mexico, but then Gary Johnson has name recognition in his home state. I don’t know how things play elsewhere, but as a rule, the polls are too close to let Republicans have a chance.

What it really comes down to is that the Republican Party needs to die.

What we have seen in the last few months, especially with Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, simply demonstrates why “conservatism” is a barren label, not just because the nominal conservative party once defined by Christian traditionalism, “economic libertarianism” and muscular patriotism is willing to twist itself to please a womanizing tariff addict and Putin bitch, but because when the premises of modern government have more to do with FDR and LBJ than Jefferson and Hamilton, the real conservatives are the mainstream liberals trying to preserve that system.

In her dissent to Janus, Elena Kagan actually said that the court were “black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”  Now, I remember when that was the conservative position on the Supreme Court. Before they were in charge, of course.

But still, here we are. And with the Supreme Court back in focus, it actually starts to clear up why Trump has such cultish loyalty among Republicans, and why even the so-called “NeverTrump” Republicans are not really willing to stick their necks out against him. It isn’t cowardice. It’s priorities. Some of this is because there are “conservatives” who really don’t have a sense of morality. But at core, the fact is that we are dealing with two totally different views on what constitutes morality.

Knowing that, how does a liberal expect to persuade a conservative to vote Democrat this year?

Well, that’s the thing, I’m not sure any liberals have asked conservatives face-to-face to switch allegiance. But let me imagine if a “NeverTrump” conservative came up to one.

Conservative: Why should I vote for Democrats in November?
Liberal: To put a check on Donald Trump.
Conservative: Let me ask: Do you think that life begins at conception and that therefore abortion is always murder?
Liberal: NO.
Conservative: Do you think the Second Amendment should be defended?
Liberal: Not really.
Conservative: Do you think the government should force every citizen to pay for private medical insurance that they may not need or want?
Liberal: If that’s what it takes to get everyone insured.

Conservative: Then why should I vote to strengthen your party at my party’s expense? What do we have in common?
Liberal: We both want to stop Trump.
Conservative: Yeah, I don’t like Trump much at all. But from what I’ve seen, he’s more willing to deal with me than you are.

Of course, that is my imagination. When one position is that abortion is always murder, there is no negotiation or “meeting halfway.” But otherwise, it used to be possible for politicians to negotiate in the abstract and on practical levels. Now negotiation is entirely internal.

There seems to be a Devil’s bargain (almost literally) on the part of right-wingers with the current Administration, where they go along with its various abuses in exchange for the pro-business policies (and pro-business judges) they want. Of course these are the same people who accurately point out that Democrats ignored the creeping powers of government and the executive branch as long as the executive promoted the “progressive” policies that they wanted. Right-wingers point out that the same people tagging “metoo” now were praising Harvey Weinstein for contributing to Democrats in 2016. And the Right were pointing out in 1998 that Democrats would defend the indefensible just for the sake of keeping Bill Clinton in power. Which is why they ought to know better. The fact that they don’t (or act like they don’t) is a big part of the problem.

And it needs to be stressed that this goes beyond Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama’s last Supreme Court pick before the 2016 Republican presidential nomination was confirmed. The Affordable Care Act got absolutely no Republican votes. It would be one thing for Republicans to be obstructionist if Republicans had something better to replace Democratic “progressive” politics with, but as we saw when they got the majority, obstruction is all they have, and it was all they could do to pass the tax cut that they did, promising that it would be paid for by growth, and blanking out the point that growth depends on the average consumer having more money, which isn’t going to happen when most of the monetary gains go to the upper percentile and the average guy with a paycheck gets maybe $20 extra.

That in itself betrays the bad-faith premise of the Republican Party, because they wouldn’t have to resort to force and deception if their programs actually benefited the majority. Were that the case, they would be trying to get more voters, rather than appealing only to the most hard-core Republicans mostly on cultural grievances. In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won 49 of 50 states. In 2016, Donald Trump won Democratic “firewall” states only by a few thousand votes. This is the difference between actually having a popular mandate and running only on hate.

Put another way, if the only way you can get pro-business or culturally conservative policy is to thwart the majority in a democratic republic, you’ve already lost. Rather than trying to convert more people to your side, like Reagan did or even George W. Bush sometimes did, modern Republicans, especially since Obama, are only trying to force things through their own clique because that’s all they have and they won’t try for anything better.

That’s why Jeff Flake will hem and haw about principles and “conscience” and vote with Republicans anyway. That’s why “pro-choice” Susan Collins made a big production about weighing her options on Brett Kavanaugh and voted for him anyway, knowing that he will vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, except maybe if she shares the suspicion of cynical conservatives that Kavanaugh will vote to uphold Roe precisely because his reputation would cause too much blowback if he did otherwise. Again, on strictly pragmatic terms this may make sense. Why would you go against Republicans if the alternative is to let Democrats win?

Well, what doth it profit a man to gain the world yet lose his own soul?

Over the last two weeks, as the nauseating details of Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance are revealed, it becomes more clear that the government of Saudi Arabia assassinated a dissident with the approval of the Trump Administration. This only highlights atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and elsewhere that were allowed to occur even before Trump got in office. Now, for all the Republicans protesting Saudi actions, what makes anybody think that a Republican Congress will actually call Trump to account on this?

And how much longer will Republicans be able to keep up the stonewalling, and what will the results be for their brand when, NOT if, they lose the majority? At this point, the only way to stop that is to counter changing demographics with attempts to demoralize the electorate, or actually grow the government for the specific purpose of preventing people from voting, or using existing agencies to stop people from getting to the polls.

So much for freedom and small government.

This is what it comes down to for me. If right-wingers are afraid of what the Left will do with power, or “conscientious” conservatives are leery of supporting Trump (yet tacitly do so anyway) they should consider that not only does the Party of Trump magnify all the vices and corruption of the Democrats, they do so with no redeeming factors. Such benefits that Republicans create not only accrue to the already well-heeled, even those people are endangered by Trump’s erratic policies on trade, which will only be exacerbated if he fumbles foreign policy. And the only way the current state of affairs to continue is for Republicans to pursue policies that are not only counter-majoritarian but anti-majoritarian. And while counter-majoritarian policies can often protect freedom, deliberately acting against the majority in all cases makes it that much less possible to correct an erroneous course, and endangers the freedom that libertarians and conservatives seek to preserve.

And in the long run, if Democrats do once again become dominant, it will be because Republicans present themselves as the guardians of traditional American government and capitalism, but their actions undermine both. If “free market” capitalism means using government force to gin the rules to benefit the already rich and powerful while killing upward mobility, that does more to promote socialism than anything the timid Democratic establishment is doing. If Republicans destroy the comity, traditions and rules of Congress, they will have no protections when Democrats have the upper hand. They by their actions are creating the very situation they claim to fear. As I keep saying, the worst case scenario is that the Party of Trump really will turn America into a one-party state – that one party being the Democrats.

If one wants to preserve freedom, there are two choices. You can do what Republicans did in the early 60s with Goldwater, Reagan and Buckley and build up an intellectual tradition that can sustain itself and grow from a minority (and anybody who thinks that the political environment is hostile to the Right now doesn’t know much about the 60s). Or you can focus on a demographic that is only motivated by grievance and try to enforce a situation where only their votes matter. The Republican party made its choice after 2012 when they rejected the “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s campaign telling them to acknowledge women and the non-white demographics of America and build common ground to grow the party. That choice is becoming increasingly untenable. I went Libertarian because for one thing, it has no choice but to appeal beyond its current confines if it wants to go anywhere, and again, the Right has actually gone through worse. However, the Republic as a whole has not. I need to support a party that actually can promote an alternative to “progressive” Democrat thinking. The Libertarians can still do this. The Republicans are far too stained for that. And ultimately they are the short-term reason that the government is a threat to freedom now.

I am not terribly happy about only voting for Democrats, but I am becoming convinced that if Republicans stay in charge, I may not get to vote for anyone besides the government party again.

Next time, I want to go over the various Nevada ballot initiatives for 2018.

The remarks of Donald J. Trump to the United Nations, September 25, 2018

Madam President, Mr. Secretary-General, world leaders, ambassadors, and distinguished delegates: One year ago, I stood before you for the first time in this grand hall. I addressed the threats facing our world, and I presented a vision to achieve a brighter future for all of humanity.

Today, I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we’ve made.  In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.

Hey c’mon folks, it wasn’t THAT funny.

The United States is stronger, safer, and a richer country than it was when I assumed office less than two years ago.  We are standing up for America and for the American people. And we are also standing up for the world.

I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions.

What?

The ongoing tragedy in Syria is heartbreaking.  I commend the people of Jordan and other neighboring countries for hosting refugees from this very brutal civil war.

Look folks, just imagine that there’s a drummer hitting the rimshot every time I finish a sentence, okay?

[bddum-TIING!]

Yeah, like that.

And what’s the thing with Brett Kavanaugh, huh?  I got this Supreme Court justice, and the Democrats don’t wanna confirm him, cause they’re bringing up all these girls from 30 years ago saying he assaulted them!  What is this?  Everybody’s so politically correct!  It’s getting to where a frat guy can’t feel a girl up anymore.  Not that I, or Brett Kavanaugh, would ever do such a thing.  Cause we’re not in a frat.  Anymore.

OK, that wasn’t a joke.  I’m sorry, where was I?

But while I’m here, I wanted to ask everybody: What’s the difference between Paul Ryan and a spineless amoeba?  No, I’m asking you cause I really don’t know.

I wanted to give a shout out to the delegations from Turkey and China, but I’ve noticed they walked out of the hall.  Was it something I said?

I have done more to bring about peace than any other president.  Before me we were headed to war with North Korea.  Now I have made peace with Kim Jong Un.  Do you mind if I call you Un?  We had a historic summit, and once we talked, I found out we had so much in common.  Like, we both want to feed political dissidents to attack panthers.  That was a joke.  But that’s the other thing, we bonded over our sense of humor.  At one point, Un was talking with me, and he said, “you know, Donald, dark humor is like food.  Not everyone gets it.”

[taps the mic] Hey, is this thing on?

But to reimmerate- retitereate – say again, our priority is Peace.  Peace and quiet.  We believe in diplomacy.  Just on our terms.  America is the defender of freedom and human rights in the world.  Just ask those Yemeni kids the Saudis killed with our drones.  HEY!

Thanks, folks!  You’ve been a great audience!  I’ll be here til Thursday, try the veal!

“The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”
-Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

On paper, Republicans have enough votes in the Senate to confirm Donald Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Despite a whole host of reasons raised by liberal Democrats, Republican solidarity, and the more uncertain status of “red state” Democrats, seemed to make Kavanaugh’s confirmation a done deal. But on September 12, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office revealed the existence of a complaint from a woman who said that Kavanaugh had tried to force himself on her at a party when they were both in high school.

This news resulted in a great deal of anger on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and even among Democrats, due to the impression that this was intended as a surprise tactic. Which was a fair point, up to the fact that Feinstein was asked to keep the account secret, and asking for an outside investigation would have required informing Republican (and Democrat) members of the committee of the matter and thus breaking that confidentiality.

The matter escalated for two reasons. On Sunday September 16, the Washington Post published the account from Professor Christine Blasey, who identified herself as the woman in question. And while Blasey says she wants to testify to the Judiciary Committee, she refuses to do so unless the FBI conducts an investigation of Kavanaugh. The existence of a named complainant had caused some “moderate” Republicans to request a delay in the confirmation hearings, but once both Glasey and Kavanaugh were asked to testify to the Committee on Monday the 24^th, some of them, like Susan Collins (R.-Maine) took the party position that Glasey was expected to appear regardless of the conditions she raised.  But then, expecting Susan Collins to buck the Republicans is like being in traffic behind the 80 year old man with his turn signal on: Maybe he’s gonna hurry up and actually make that turn, just not in the next ten miles.

Trump’s party, the same party that (correctly) decided that a president lying about a consensual affair deserved to be impeached are now at pains to excuse what may or may not be a consensual encounter. Judiciary Committee member Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) said on Hugh Hewitt’s show, “I’d hate to have somebody ask me what I did 35 years ago.” It turns out that in 2015, Judge Kavanaugh had joked to law students,  “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.” Apparently Georgetown Prep is like Las Vegas, only with more sex and booze.

According to Blasey’s own account, the only other person involved in the assault, who inadvertently put a stop to it, was Mark Judge, who has described himself in those days as a blackout drinker, so he might not be in position to confirm one way or another, and in any case is not a great character witness. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher points out, “I was in college from 1985-89, and the general cultural sensibility was far more like “Animal House” than it is like today. High school and college kids who got loaded did it mostly to get rid of our inhibitions and have sex. You’d better believe that my memories of drinking culture back then has strongly affected the way I am raising my kids.”

Which only confirms that of all the mistakes I made in my youth, deciding to live sober was not one of them. Cause if I am supposed to believe that getting drunk specifically in order to kill inhibitions was that common then… then that really explains a LOT of what’s going on now, doesn’t it?

Republicans are of course up against a wall. Not only do they have the midterms, the Supreme Court begins its next term of sessions on the traditional first Monday in October. Dragging this out another week would mean the Court has only eight Justices. Of course, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans were fine with the Court having only eight Justices after Antonin Scalia died cause Barack Obama had cooties or something, so… fuck ’em.

The liberal position in this case seems to be the opposite of mine. The liberals are fixated on protecting Roe v. Wade and know that this appointee, like any Republican appointee, would want to strike down that case, and so because they disagree with that particular, they want to cast about for reasons why he would be a bad nominee in general. Whereas in examining Kavanaugh’s record, he is not simply a conservative jurist, which any Republican would be expected to nominate. Specifically, the Republicans have generally been averse to providing any information on Kavanaugh to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to the point of timing a “data dump” the day before committee hearings so that such information could not be processed though it was technically provided. Then in hearings, Kavanaugh’s history as a member of the Bush Administration was reviewed, along with his confirmation hearings for the DC court, and he contradicted himself at several points. While legal experts do not think this necessarily amounts to perjury,  Kavanaugh is cementing a reputation of evasiveness. Then there’s the statements he has made. Kavanaugh in hearing refused to confirm to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) that U.S. v. Nixon was rightly decided and that he would follow that precedent in a future case (on the odd chance that a president might put himself in a situation where he could be under subpoena). He did this by saying: “So, that’s a hypothetical question about what would be an elaboration or a difference from US v. Nixon’s precise holding. And I think, going with the Justice Ginsburg principle, which is really not the Justice Ginsburg alone principle. It’s everyone’s principle on the current Supreme Court, and as a matter of the canons of judicial independence, I can’t give you an answer on that hypothetical question.” (This despite the fact that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was questioned on the issue of abortion during her confirmation hearing, she stated,  ‘It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she be the decisionmaker, that her choice be controlling ‘) And in regard to abortion itself, very recently Judge Kavanaugh was central to a three-judge panel decision in a case brought by a 17-year-old “Jane Doe” unauthorized immigrant, preventing her from receiving an abortion until such decision was reversed on emergency appeal. This is important because not only does precedent on Roe establish that there is a right to abortion even for female minors but also for non-citizens in this country. Kavanaugh’s decision not only attempted to override the right to abortion but to establish a precedent in which rights that had previously been deemed to apply to non-citizens can be taken by the government.

So while liberals start from a particular concern (abortion rights) and then look for reasons to justify their antipathy to Kavanaugh on general grounds, the real issue – when judicial conservative antipathy to abortion is a given – is that there is already enough general evidence to conclude that Kavanaugh is an ethically unfit nominee and would thus be likely to make an individual decision that is unethical. Not necessarily including manhandling a girl 35 years ago, but perhaps including unequivocally lying about it now.

(As one of Rod Dreher’s commenters put it, ‘I’m afraid that once [Kavanaugh] issued a categorical denial the only important ethical question left is “did he do it?” If not, than all of the above is not applicable. If so, the issue is should we confirm a 53 year old liar, not a 17 year old drunk.’)

Donald Trump, recognizing his lack of conservative bona fides, took the step of getting an approved list of judicial nominees (including Neil Gorsuch). Brett Kavanaugh did not make the first two drafts of that list.  Since 2016, Kavanaugh had given a set of speeches intended to signal allegiance to Heritage Foundation legal positions. In October 2016, Kavanaugh wrote an opinion for the D.C. Circuit court that the President had the capacity to fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a decision that was reversed in that court in January 2018. The “Jane Doe” abortion case was in October 2017. And when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Court in July of 2018, he praised Trump, saying, somewhat improbably, “I’ve witnessed firsthand your appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary. No President has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.”  Brett Kavanaugh clearly subscribes to the philosophy, “reality is what helps you pass the exam.”

Of course no matter how embarrassing this whole thing gets for Republicans, they’re going to bull through all objections, because that’s been their philosophy since at least the Merrick Garland nomination, and well before Donald Trump was elected. It’s that much more their philosophy since Trump has taught them that they can get away with public disgrace as long as they get just enough votes in just the right places. So despite all the rancor, Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Court, because all the Good Christians, covered in their own drool at the prospect of killing Roe v. Wade, will let Trump get what he wants, oblivious to the point that Trump only wants this guy because he’s the only prospect who’s signaled that he will go Trump’s way in the event of a legal confrontation with the government – a possibility that is far stronger than a “hypothetical”.

But I could be wrong. It could be that Trump can be made to back down, as he did in his defenses of Vladimir Putin after sucking up to him in Helsinki. Or perhaps Brett Kavanaugh might have less stomach for sleaze than his boss, and withdraw himself. That would require the Administration to start over again. This would please lots of conservatives who thought that Trump made the wrong choice to begin with, like Catholic columnist Matthew Walther in The Week: “Why not the apparent runner-up, Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals? It is difficult to imagine her being implicated in anything like the present scandal. She was in every imaginable sense a better candidate in the first place. I for one do not relish the prospect of the fifth vote to uphold Roe v. Wade being cast by a would-be rapist appointed by our twice-divorced serial philanderer-in-chief. My sense of humor just isn’t that bleak.”

Well, mine is. Because, “conservatives”, this is what you get when you tether your hopes and dreams and what pass for your ideas to a cult of personality led by a fruitfly-brain who can’t think of anything above himself.

Which reminds me-

Y’all sick of winning yet?

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From a Birmingham County Jail

In the wake of Trump cronies Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort getting convicted on tax charges, Donald Trump’s issues continue to escalate. Veteran journalist Bob Woodward released excerpts from his upcoming book on the Trump Administration, Fear: Trump in the White House, that only served to confirm that various named officials loathe Trump, including Chief of Staff John Kelly, who Woodward quotes as saying “we’re in Crazytown… this is the worst job I’ve ever had.” And Kelly was in combat. But then in combat, the people shooting you are usually to your front.

Somehow even this news didn’t get the same attention as the now-famous September 5 piece in The New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“,  where the Times Op-Ed staff stated first that the author was “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. ” (This incidentally rules out Mike Pence, because Vice President is an elected position.) While stressing their conservative bona fides, the author states “the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic” and “the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” Of course the surprise is that anyone is surprised that the quadruple-bankrupt Jersey casino boss and comic relief on The Apprentice is not entirely truthful or ethical. And yet this maneuver raised more hackles than Woodward’s attributed accounts. The piece has of course been pored over by numerous people already. One of the common themes – especially among Trump defenders – is that such insubordination and subversion of policy is an attempt to thwart democracy. Well, first, there’s the practical question of whether Trump has a policy in any given area. But there’s also the point that the only reason Trump is even president is because America is NOT a majoritarian democracy, but a federal republic. Even in that context, voters – or the Electors of their states – chose Donald Trump, not John Kelly or one of the people he hired. But that point just returns the question to where it belongs.

The anonymous Times author tells the readers: “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t. The result is a two-track presidency.” But by the author’s own admission, this “two-track presidency” is attempting to enforce sanctions on Russia that Congress demanded and Trump will barely even acknowledge. The author doesn’t even bring up Trump’s violations of human rights on the border, including test run cases to see if the government can take the rights of non-citizens in order to remove them from the rest of us. Assuming that there are adults in the room – which is really debatable – what’s the point of having responsible adults in the room if they can be pushed around by a bratty child? The problem is not the people Trump hired. The problem is that the guy who was elected is NOT a responsible adult.

But still, this sort of thing hurts Trump where he lives, because this account on top of the Woodward expose simply confirms that Trump is not at war with an establishment “deep state” but rather his own people, who may not know much but are either ethical enough to balk at some things or pragmatic enough to realize that their boy is threatening the gravy train.

At various points, liberals have warned that the Administration and its sympathizers are engaging in “gaslighting,” pushing a secret agenda in such a way that they can deny doing so and make their opponents look delusional. Like, how supposedly there’s a white-supremacist plot to use the “OK” gesture as a secret gang sign so that when one of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s former employees flashed it at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing,  we had to have a serious debate as to whether using the OK sign makes you a racist. But I’ve stated for quite some time that when Donald Trump believes his own hype, lies even when he doesn’t have to (or when it would backfire on him) and doesn’t want facts about him to come out, he ultimately doesn’t believe in objective reality and prefers the notion that changing the consensus means you can change the facts. In other words, he is far more vulnerable to gaslighting than even liberals, who for all their post-modernism, still have the ingrained assumption that outside reality is a thing that exists.

Especially, if Woodward’s account is true, former Economic Advisor Gary Cohn saw an order on Trump’s desk to withdraw from an important trade agreement with South Korea and countered it by simply taking the document off his desk, which indicates not only that Trump is disconnected with reality, he may have no sense of object permanence.

Prior to the release of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump might not have been aware that he was held in such low esteem by his own people, because Trump’s picture is in the dictionary next to “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” But now he knows. And the gaslighting is, he knows but he can’t say exactly WHO said these mean things about him. It could be anybody on his staff. Maybe ALL of them.

But that gets to a question that a lot of commentators have pondered: If the only thing that allows sanity to prevail at court is that the Emperor doesn’t know that his worst impulses are being thwarted, what is the point of letting him know it? It could be that given what we already know about the knife-fighting atmosphere inside the White House, that this piece was actually written by one of the true believers who wanted to raise Trump’s ire for the purpose of getting him to purge anybody who wasn’t sufficiently devoted to goodthink. Which would be the tactic of a truly spiteful, conniving, needledicked bugfucker. In other words, Stephen Miller.

Or, it could be that after Senator Bob Corker’s comment about all the Republicans looking at Trump’s unfitness and quailing, “we don’t want to confront him, we don’t wanna poke the bear!” Anonymous decided, “poke the fucking bear, already.” If Trump really is that unfit, and sensible people can only do so much to conceal that – especially since they can’t conceal Trump’s behavior with other heads of government – then the only way out is through.

Last week I was on Facebook, where someone had posted the line, “I hope there’s never a president who makes us look at Trump the way Trump is making us look at George W. Bush.” Which caused me to bring up my axiom, “every new president somehow lowers the bar.” And some asked how I could apply that to Barack Obama, who was generally a good guy. The point I made was: “The reason I include Obama is because of what he didn’t do. By not prosecuting Bush-Cheney officials for war crimes and not prosecuting the Wall Street culprits of the Great Recession, Obama allowed their bad behavior to stand as precedent. And that lowers the bar. All the liberals who (correctly) condemn Trumpublicans for degrading civic norms need to consider that the other party didn’t enforce them either. ” And one of my liberal Facebook friends went, “Oh brother. Obama was supposed to prosecute for war crimes etc.? Bullshit. The Repugnants would have loved that shit show. Really? How would Obama pull that off? Democrats are not the ‘Benghazi the shit out of it party’. Regardless of war crimes then the reality of trying to prosecute. Did you forget this is the same nation with a monkey in charge? And then you think a black president, Democrat no less can prosecute the previous administration for war crimes? Did you forget this (is) the US of A? “

In the immortal words of Yoda, “that is why you fail.”

I like Obama, but overall, he was kind of passive. In fact, I could argue – and have – that the refusal of Obama and other Democrats to confront the Republican subversion of norms was a huge part of how those norms deteriorated even before Trump. If anything, the rise of Trump should make it clear that there is a recipe for success in bucking the establishment process and not being politically correct. You’re not supposed to bash Mexicans. You’re not supposed to mock disabled people on stage. You’re not supposed to bring up pussies or bleeding. But he did, and he won. Now imagine if such a power was used for Good instead of Evil.

This leads me to something else that happened this week. During the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Republicans only released most of their data on Kavanaugh the day before the start of hearings, so that Democrats wouldn’t have time to go over it. Not only that, the Trump Administration, in an unprecedented step, used “presidential privilege” to withhold access to documents from Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush Administration. Such documents that the Senate has access to were marked “committee confidential” even though the Senate Judiciary Committee was in open session. Well, Senator Cory Booker (D.-New Jersey) decided that rather than having the committee-confidential documents from the Bush era withheld from discussion, he would release them to the public through his office, even though Senator John Cornyn (R.-Texas) reminded him that penalties for violating Senate committee confidentiality included possible expulsion from the Senate. Senator Booker did it anyway.

Cory Booker is everybody who’s ever had to put up with the stifling correctness on a leftist (OR right-wing) Internet forum and its pissy, control-freak moderators and who eventually tells them, “Go ahead and BAN me, motherfucker.”

The difference is, it actually worked, because while Booker might still get censured, kicking him out of the Senate would just force a special election – in Democrat-friendly New Jersey – in which his ouster would necessarily be a central issue. In other words, Booker raised a bluff that he knew the Republicans couldn’t call.

We need more people like him, frankly.

Otherwise the “sane” party of Democrats are just the flip side of “sane” Republicans who enable erosions of the rule of law and the most pungent perversions of justice because they’re more scared of disruptions to regular order. There is no point in playing by the rules when the Republicans threw the rules out years ago. This is exactly why things got to this state: Because everyone in Washington is a fucking marshmallow who goes along to get along.

Anyone who wonders why I’m a “third” party voter, this is a big part of it. Because you “responsible adults in the room” let us all down, and now the republic is endangered because of it.

This is in response to Robert W. Merry’s column at The American Conservative on August 29, “Why Trump’s Approval Numbers Won’t Budge.”

To Mr. Merry:

In your August 29 piece, you wrote about how the Monday polls from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News showed that Donald Trump’s poll numbers were 44% approval, as opposed to 46% before Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen were convicted of tax crimes. (Your piece was of course written before the Washington Post-ABC News poll.) And you asked the reader, “Why?”

“Because this isn’t about the fate of Trump so much as the future of America. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down on illegal immigration and a serious reduction in overall immigration after a decades-long influx of unprecedented proportions; an effort to address the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity through trade policies; an end to our nation-building zeal and the wars of choice spawned by it; and a promise to curtail the power of elites who gave us unfettered immigration, an industrial decline, endless wars, years of lukewarm economic growth, and an era of globalism that slighted old-fashioned American nationalism. “

Uh, no.

This is just my theory, but I believe what we are seeing is analogous to 2016, when liberals would wail that the election of Donald Trump would mean the end of Western Civilization, even as they fake-acknowledged their candidate’s issues by saying things like “Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can’t America See That?” And yet, for all the Chicken Littles saying the sky would fall, not that many of them could be arsed to go out and vote for Clinton. And who could blame them? At least she was actually on the ballot, though.

Continued support for Trump in the polls is a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, just as the entire “conservative” movement is now a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, a mindset in which pronouncing “Mexico will pay for the wall” or “we repealed the Johnson Amendment” magically makes it so. But what of the rest of us still living in the real world?

In that world, Republicans have been threatened in special elections, many of which were only necessary because of the number of incumbents who decided to (or had to) retire early. In Ohio’s 12^th Congressional District, Troy Balderson was only this week declared the winner of the August 7 special election, in a district that was “R+14” for Trump in 2016. Most general election races are in districts where the margin was not that favorable to Republicans. This is why I think such base that Trump has is not as tough as it appears, and later in your column, you seem to admit this.

“For those committed to the new world envisioned by the coalition of the ascendant, it is easy to see Trump, with all of his crudeness and vulgarity, as evil. After all, he’s personally distasteful and he wants to destroy the America of their dreams. But for Trump supporters, he represents their last hope for preserving the old America. These people view the stakes as so high that the president’s personal indecency and civic brutishness simply don’t register as problems. They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause. “

That’s dodging the point. Indeed, for much of Trump’s audience (as opposed to the respectable cloth-coat Republicans he pushed aside in the primaries) Trump’s crudeness and vulgarity are features. And if you’re liberal or libertarian, or at least libertine, crudeness and vulgarity are not themselves evil. Rather, the crudeness and vulgarity are incidental to actual evil, which the rest of us are focusing on and Trumpniks are desperately seeking to rationalize. What is it, Mr. Perry, that you think conservatives are getting from this Administration?

In your own website this week, one of your authors points out that the Trump Administration policy of unilaterally siding with Israel on the Palestine issue denies what little right to self-determination Palestinians have, forcing the burden of Palestinian refugees on neighboring Arab states even as the Administration refuses to let Syrian refugees into this country.

And your most prolific blogger, Christian conservative Rod Dreher, has been doggedly focused on the corruption of the Catholic Church, which is not entirely sexual, and may even be at its core financial. In a column written the same day as your piece, Dreher mentioned his attempts years ago to unearth the earlier pedophilia scandal: “I am reminded of the conservative Catholic men who, I was told, was part of a group of laity who flew to Rome in or around 2000, to warn officials at the Vatican not to name McCarrick to Washington, because he was a sexual predator. When I phoned in 2002 to ask one of the men, he told me he indeed went on that trip, but refused to talk about it. When I phoned the second man on my list to ask about it, he answered, ‘If that were true, I wouldn’t tell you for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.’  Well, it’s all out in the open now, and McCarrick’s foulness has tainted two more popes. If those men had cared more about the truth in 2002 than about protecting the image of the Church by covering up for a wicked cardinal, perhaps the McCarrick boil would have been lanced, and Church wouldn’t be facing such a grave crisis today. There is a lesson here for everyone, not just Catholics, and not just Christians. ‘Live not by lies,’ said Solzhenitsyn.”

But never mind that stuff, because obviously it has no analogy to the political situation.

Right now you have Trump telling Evangelicals that Democrats are a threat to “your religion” (not his) at the same time it’s been revealed that the government is refusing to acknowledge the passports of Hispanic citizens. In that regard, do you want people to focus on the lurid immorality that doesn’t affect them, or do you want them to focus on the lurid immorality that affects public policy?

It’s one thing for leftist propagandists to call right-wingers racist, authoritarian theocrats, but it’s another thing for “conservatives” to actively justify such opinion and spread it even among those who were neutral to or hostile to the Left. And you’re on track to lose a historic number of House seats because your only real achievement was a tax cut that doesn’t benefit most voters and actually kills deductions for people in a lot of crucial states. On policy, you were still going down the spiral, but you at least had the image of morality to pull you back up to public esteem eventually. Now that’s gone. Your moral capital is at a net negative. As Dreher said in another column this week, “People will not take you seriously as a proclaimer of Truth if their aesthetic and moral senses tell them otherwise.” Which is why it does no good to make pronouncements on “evil” or cast the culture war in apocalyptic terms when you are eagerly racing to become the very thing you swore to destroy.

As for “They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause” – dare I suggest, maybe you’ve become too repellent for your pick of candidates? Heck, Condoleeza Rice would be a more wholesome leader for the conservative movement than your precious little boy, and I can think of at least two reasons why y’all wouldn’t want her.

“All of this supports the view, which I have posited in the past, that while Trump may have been brilliant in crafting a successful electoral coalition in 2016, he hasn’t managed to turn that into a governing coalition. This can be seen in part by his lack of any apparent inclination to talk to Americans who aren’t already part of his base. “

Well… yeah.

Trump was brilliant at identifying Americans’ grievances, but since his only concern was self-aggrandizement, he had no plan to address them. Nevertheless, people were so fed up with the status quo under Democrats and establishment Republicans that Trump won just enough votes for the Electoral College. Likewise, if people are mad enough at the status quo, it doesn’t matter whether or not Democrats have any constructive ideas, what matters is flushing out the status quo.

This is what happens when you hitch your star to somebody who doesn’t share your long-term goals or even have any long-term goals at all besides staying one step ahead of investigators and lawyers.

Even you guys in the Pat Buchanan camp, and the various corporate sponsors, the kind of people who could in theory craft a competent version of American authoritarianism, are in practice acting emotionally and reactively and refusing to admit that your Great Helmsman has all the concentration and direction sense of a squirrel on meth.

But if you actually had an idea how to accomplish all those “new directions” like re-assessing immigration priorities (as opposed to simply targeting brown people) or rebuilding our manufacturing base (as opposed to simply pandering to coal country while jobs continue to go overseas), then you would have been able to sell those ideas without Trump. You need him for the same reason that you obey him: because you’ve got nothing else to sell.

There is no greater purpose than Donald Trump to defend, because the “conservative movement” has nothing to offer even the people who should be attracted to it. The modern Republican Party is a beast that can no longer exist in the wild. It is a fantastic chimera, with two squabbling heads, one Christian fundamentalist and one fiscal libertarian, trying to pull a body composed of working class populists who could care less about either of them but just want to save their jobs. Those are the people who actually vote for the Republicans, as opposed to the people who fund them or write the policy agendas, and after Trump, the folks have figured out that they don’t need those guys anymore. Of course, the joke is on them, sort of. They don’t care about free markets, and Trump doesn’t either, and they don’t care about Jesus, and Trump doesn’t either. They do care about coal and steel – and Trump doesn’t. But he acts like he does, and that’s more than “flyover country” had gotten from the two parties before.

Now even in optimal circumstances, Democrats will never get 67 Senators to vote for an impeachment. So we’re all stuck with Trump for two more years. And in those two years, you will all be saying to yourselves, over and over and over and over and over and over again, “Neil Gorsuch was SO TOTALLY WORTH IT.” Because I predict that things will get a lot worse for your party in the next two years. And I bet that you think so too.

The now born-again Christian Blackie Lawless likes to tell a story about his time with the shock rock band W.A.S.P., most famous for the song “F*ck Like A Beast.” Blackie would pose on posters with a spandex costume and a codpiece with a buzzsaw blade coming out of it, and on stage, he would frequently arm the codpiece with various explosive rockets so that they would fire off of his groin during the set. Well, one show, the explosive charges misfired and exploded inside the codpiece, leaving Blackie with screaming pain and a seriously burned crotch, as happens in these situations. And his bandmates came to visit him in the hospital, with the bandages on his crotch, and his guitarist told him, “y’know, Blackie, we wouldn’t have to do these gimmicks if we could just write better songs.”

That’s kind of how I feel about the Republican Party.

And before your anodyne conclusion, “This has been a resilient nation over its 230-year history. It will need all the resiliency it can muster as we move forward”, you theorize: “The country is split down the seams, and some kind of Hegelian synthesis will eventually have to emerge that incorporates elements of the two competing visions of America that today are roiling national politics—and which seem irreconcilable. “

Oh, so an integration of America’s generically liberal political idealism with the practical considerations of culture, economics and national security. Yeah, Robert, I remember when such a synthesis still existed. It was called conservatism. You mind telling me what happened to it?