Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

On May 22^nd, National Review Online posted an article by scholar Victor Davis Hanson, called “The Trump Rationale,” attempting to explain Donald Trump’s lasting appeal to his base. The article’s subheader is: “His voters knew what they were getting, and most support him still.”

The piece does indeed explain the psychology of the Trump supporter, though perhaps not in the way Hanson intended. To properly review it, I decided it needs a good old-fashioned fisking.

(A note: ‘fisking‘ refers to an incident where the left-wing journalist Robert Fisk had one of his columns demolished by a right-winger, point by point. The term should not be confused with ‘fisting,’ although the intention and result are often similar.)

“1) Was Trump disqualified by his occasional but demonstrable character flaws and often rank vulgarity? To believe that plaint, voters would have needed a standard by which both past media of coverage of the White House and the prior behavior of presidents offered some useful benchmarks. Unfortunately, the sorts of disturbing things we know about Trump we often did not know in the past about other presidents. By any fair measure, the sexual gymnastics in the White House and West Wing of JFK and Bill Clinton, both successful presidents, were likely well beyond President Trump’s randy habits. “ (et cetera…)

This sort of thing is why the average person is more and more cynical, because both houses of the duopoly are doing their utmost to promote the ideal that might makes right and “objective morality” is just a consolation prize for losers. Recall that in the days of Monicagate, the people on Hanson’s side – I was one of them – were railing about how tolerating Bill Clinton’s immorality was going to degrade the political culture. Now that the “conservatives” benefit from that degraded standard, they act like it was handed down from Saint Augustine. Meanwhile, Democrats offered the same defenses “conservatives” offer now, they benefited from Clinton’s popularity, and in more recent years they got a lot of their precious campaign money from the likes of Harvey Weinstein (and we’re alternately supposed to believe that either ‘everybody knew’ or ‘nobody knew’ about his violations). And now that enabling misogyny has bitten them in the ass last election, liberals have developed an acute case of scruples.

In any case, this particular subject is something I’ve already addressed on a semi-regular basis. We do not need to go over how many areas of complaint that Republicans have with Democrats, the Clintons in particular, to compare to what Trump and his cronies are actually doing. Comparison of rhetoric to fact just demonstrates that for all the erudition of Victor Davis Hanson – and I used to be a fan – he is providing a rationalization, not a rationale. During the campaign and certainly now, support for Trump was less a matter of rationality and more an appeal to tribal emotionalism. I wish these guys had just been honest enough to say: “Don’t vote for the liberal bitch who lies to you, ignores security procedures and exploits financial corruption. Vote for the conservative white guy who does all of that in spades!”

“2) Personal morality and public governance are related, but we are not always quite sure how. Jimmy Carter was both a more moral person and a worse president than Bill Clinton. Jerry Ford was a more ethical leader than Donald Trump — and had a far worse first 16 months. FDR was a superb wartime leader — and carried on an affair in the White House, tried to pack and hijack the Supreme Court, sent U.S. citizens into internment camps, and abused his presidential powers in ways that might get a president impeached today. In the 1944 election, the Republican nominee Tom Dewey was the more ethical — and stuffy — man. In matters of spiritual leadership and moral role models, we wish that profane, philandering (including an affair with his step-niece), and unsteady General George S. Patton had just conducted himself in private and public as did the upright General Omar Bradley. But then we would have wished even more that Bradley had just half the strategic and tactical skill of Patton. If he had, thousands of lives might have been spared in the advance to the Rhine. Trump is currently not carrying on an affair with his limousine driver, as Ike probably was with Kay Summersby while commanding all Allied forces in Europe following D-Day. Rarely are both qualities, brilliance and personal morality, found in a leader — even among our greatest, such as the alcoholic Grant or the foul-mouthed and occasionally crude Truman. “

All of which is setting up a false choice between personal morality and brilliance (or even competence). It is false not because this conflict cannot be observed in history, but because Trump is neither moral nor brilliant. Unless grifting counts as brilliance, in which case he’s fuckin’ Leonardo da Vinci.

“3) Trump did not run in a vacuum. A presidential vote is not a one-person race for sainthood but, like it or not, often a choice between a bad and worse option. Hillary Clinton would have likely ensured a 16-year progressive regnum. “

Everything is always “but Clinton would be worse.” No doubt this will continue to be the excuse no matter what depth Trump reaches: Clinton will always be worse, even when it is demonstrable that Trump is worse, if simply due to the fact that he’s the actual president now.

“As far as counterfactual “what ifs” go, by 2024, at the end of Clinton’s second term, a conservative might not have recognized the federal judiciary, given the nature of lifetime appointees. The lives of millions of Americans would have been radically changed in an Obama-Clinton economy that probably would not have seen GDP or unemployment levels that Americans are now enjoying. “

I’ll just leave this here: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/27/606078181/economy-probably-started-2018-off-slow-short-of-trumps-growth-target

“What John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Peter Strzok, Sally Yates, and others did in 2016 would never have been known — given that their likely obstruction, lying, and lawbreaking were predicated on being unspoken recommendations for praise and advancement in a sure-thing Clinton administration. Christopher Steele might have either been unknown — or lionized. “

But YOU would have been making it known, Victor. You and the other guys in the “conservative” grievance media, in the same way that you are making hay from these people now, and no one except the grievance media and their audience particularly cares. Because while certain elements – like Bill Clinton demanding an audience at the airport with Loretta Lynch over Hillary’s email investigation – deserved bipartisan attention, even the valid points of investigation don’t get it because the whole complaint is smothered in bad faith.

“4) Something had gone haywire with the Republican party at the national level. “

Finally, a point of agreement.

“The proverbial Republican elite had become convinced that globalization, open borders, and free but unfair trade were either unstoppable or the fated future or simply irrelevant. Someone or something — even if painfully and crudely delivered — was bound to arise to remind the conservative Washington–New York punditocracy, the party elite, and Republican opinion makers that a third of the country had all but tuned them out. It was no longer sustainable to expect the conservative base to vote for more versions of sober establishmentarians like McCain and Romney just because they were Republicans, well-connected, well-résuméd, well-known, well-behaved, and played by the gloves-on Marquess of Queensberry political rules. Instead, such men and much of orthodox Republican ideology were suspect.

“Amnestied illegal aliens would not in our lifetimes become conservative family-values voters. Vast trade deficits with China and ongoing chronic commercial cheating would not inevitably lead to the prosperity that would guarantee Chinese democracy. Asymmetrical trade deals were not sacrosanct under the canons of free trade. Unfettered globalization, outsourcing, and offshoring were not both inevitable and always positive. The losers of globalization did not bring their misery on themselves. The Iran deal was not better than nothing. North Korea would not inevitably remain nuclear. Middle East peace did not hinge of constant outreach to and subsidy of the corrupt and autocratic Palestinian Authority and Hamas cliques. “

The first part, that the Republican elite was irrelevant to the average voter, let alone the average Republican, is true. The second part is more rationalizing. Assuming that Trump’s policies are a constructive approach to illegal immigration, China’s unfair trade practices, North Korea or the Middle East is to deny the fact that Trump has no care about any of these things and knows that much less.

The hardcore critique of the Republican establishment, whether one is a populist or “economic conservative” is that Republican leadership doesn’t care about the average voter. But that’s because Republicans have always tried to split the difference between appealing to the people who fund their campaigns and the people who actually vote for them, even though these two priorities are often at odds. The punch line to the joke is that this is exactly what they’re doing now, because Trump is the only person who appeals to both camps, and as long as he’s throwing red meat to the culture warriors, they won’t care that the rich sponsors are soaking the poor.

“5) Lots of deep-state rust needed scraping. Yet it is hard to believe that either a Republican or Democratic traditionalist would have seen unemployment go below 4 percent, or the GDP rate exceed 3 percent, or would have ensured the current level of deregulation and energy production. A President Mitt Romney might not have rammed through a tax-reform policy like that of the 2017 reform bill. I cannot think of a single Republican 2016 candidate who either could or would have in succession withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, demanded China recalibrate its asymmetrical and often unfair mercantile trade policies, sought to secure the border, renounced the Iran deal, moved to denuclearize North Korea, and hectored front-line NATO allies that their budgets do not reflect their promises or the dangers on their borders. “

Something approaching substance here. The hardcore Republicans are indeed getting a lot of what they want from this president, and I think we can agree that President Romney would not have “rammed through” what he wanted, because as a career politician he was raised on procedure and not might-makes-right. So were Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, but they at least as much as Trump set the stage for an environment where Republicans “ram through” everything they want with absolutely no regard for the other people on the floor. Not that Democrats deserve any special courtesy, but it’s rather telling that the less popular mandate Republican policies have, the more fanatic they are at enforcing them, not despite popular will, but actively against it. And even though one arm of that political machine is voter suppression, the more the ruling faction acts in defiance of outside reality, the more likely they are to come to error, which will only serve to compound their unpopularity. Creating such a radical “rammed through” regime was always a bad idea. It usually is when the midterm election after a new president’s election leads to a severe loss in seats to the ruling party, even when it isn’t deliberately TRYING to piss off the nonpartisan voter. Ask the Democrats. The last time they had both houses of Congress, they used it to pass Obamacare, and they lost their Senate majority just in time for the Census. Another hint: It’s easier to roll back tax cuts than expansions to the medical bureaucracy.

“6) Something or someone was needed to remind the country that there is no longer a Democratic party as we once knew it. It is now a progressive and identity-politics religious movement. “

I just find it odd that a conservative in National Review is using the term “religious movement” as a pejorative. Unless Hanson, like many of us, has reached the conclusion that most religious movements are not introspective attempts to find values in the transcendent, but shabby pretexts for justifying political prejudices on the grounds that some things cannot be explained by reason. If he believes this, I say: welcome to the club.

“Trump took on his left-wing critics as few had before, did not back down, and did not offer apologies. He traded blow for blow with them. “

And I’ve mentioned that one point of value in Trump is that his don’t-give-a-fuck attitude is instructive for anyone who wants to counter the crybully tactics of the Left. But that still begs the question of what you are going to replace the old liberal order with, and Hanson leaves himself empty-handed when he says, in so many words, “look, Eisenhower diddled his staff chauffeur, and things turned out great.”

The point is not that personal immorality is an automatic disqualifier for a statesman. But is it an automatic qualifier? Are we approving on the basis of vices instead of virtues? Of course even Hanson isn’t so dense as to explicitly assert this, even if that is what he is asserting implicitly. What you do is judge an individual on balance. That is why history judges Martin Luther King Jr. as positive on the whole (despite his adultery), why the historical judgment on Bill Clinton is far more ambiguous, and why the judgment on Donald Trump is already decidedly in the negative.

Of course, that could change. Trump could get a peace deal with North Korea, although maybe not.  Even if he did, that might not put him on the side of the angels. After all, in 1929, Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty, creating Vatican City in Rome and thus solving the diplomatic impasse between the secular Italian state and the “captive” Papacy. This is an achievement that stands to this day. Why then did Mussolini end his life executed, dragged through the street and hung up to be spat on and jeered at by his former subjects? Well, I guess after you kill political opponents, gas Ethiopians, turn the military into a joke and turn the government into a collaborator with the Holocaust, people judge you on balance.

“In the end, only the people will vote on Trumpism. His supporters knew full well after July 2016 that his possible victory would come with a price — one they deemed more than worth paying given the past and present alternatives. “

Quite. Even if Democrats get Congress back this year (and again, these guys could find a way to strike out in a whorehouse), you need two-thirds of the Senate to impeach. Republicans couldn’t do it to Clinton when the country was far less polarized. But then, Clinton was far more popular. And the reason why Democrats might get the House back is that America has paid the price for Trump, and now that we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore (I fucking hope), Trump has lost his one surefire rallying point. That’s why he keeps relitigating an election that he WON, so that his dupes will have something to rile them up rather than think about how the country is scarcely better off than it was under Obama.

“To calibrate the national mood, they simply ask Trump voters whether they regret their 2016 votes (few do) “

https://www.facebook.com/IRegretVotingForTrump/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/us-small-farmers-regret-voting-trump-180330092417106.html

http://prospect.org/article/how-ambivalent-trump-voters-feel-about-him-now

“and whether any Never Trump voters might reconsider (some are), “

Again, that depends on whether Republicans can rally enough people around being the NotDemocrat party when that’s really all they have to offer. Based on the latest round of special elections and primaries, I’m not so sure.

“and then they’re usually reassured that what is happening is what they thought would happen: a 3 percent GDP economy, low unemployment, record energy production, pushbacks on illegal immigration, no Iran deal, no to North Korean missiles pointed at the U.S., renewed friendship with Israel and the Gulf states, a deterrent foreign policy, stellar judicial appointments — along with Robert Mueller, Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, and lots more, no doubt, to come. “

Drip, drip, drip, Trumpniks.

The Canadian debate series The Munk Debates had an event in Toronto Friday May 18, on the thesis “Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress.” The debate was speaker Michael Eric Dyson and New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg on the side of political correctness with the opposition represented by British celebrity Stephen Fry and University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxYimeaoea0

Fry of course was awesome. Goldberg came off very well, and for the most part, so did Dyson, though calling Peterson a “mean white man” was a low blow that did not do him any favors. I also think he didn’t realize how badly that would play with Peterson’s hometown crowd.

Peterson nevertheless was the weakest part of the event. He first gained the attention of people like myself when he was interviewed by an opinionated person from Britain’s Channel 4,  and came off as the reasonable person against somebody trying to push an agenda. This time he was the one who was irritated that no one was stressing his agenda, which includes among other premises the idea that the root of political correctness is an attempt to foist Marxist concepts onto Western culture in order to undermine it. And when insulted by Dyson, he actually would have been more effective if he’d made a brief rebuttal and then let it go, but the situation clearly unbalanced him.

Problem is, the issue isn’t quite as simple as saying that political correctness is all bad. Neither is it all good. Fry describes himself as a liberal, but took the “anti” position. Goldberg is pro-political correctness on the whole, but in her opening statement said there were some aspects of the movement that she wasn’t on board with, though she didn’t specify what they were. Fry had mentioned in his opening statement, “I believe that one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right rather than to be effective.” I have mentioned that on balance, I think that a lot of the “politically correct” movements, like #metoo, are vehicles for progress and the people in charge are dealing with the current moment in a reasonable manner. But there are examples of excess.

The main example that comes to my mind was the takedown of Minnesota’s Democratic Senator, Al Franken. Last year, former model and USO supporter Leann Tweeden described a USO tour with Franken in 2006 (when he was still a comic coming off his career at Saturday Night Live) and alleged that he French-kissed her without consent during rehearsal of a skit, and was also photographed pretending to reach for her breasts while she slept. After this accusation was made public, several other women came forward with similar stories that they said took place during Franken’s political career in Minnesota. This sort of thing would normally have gone through the Senate Ethics Committee for internal review, a process that Franken agreed to submit to. But several Democratic politicians, namely Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D – New York) called for his immediate resignation. But we know what was really going on. Liberals could see that the real problem was Trump being a misogynist thug, but they can’t do anything about that, so in order to “do something” they decided to single out a problematic person who could be leveraged, and thus removed one of their own most popular and effective advocates from politics.

And this is why I don’t trust the Left to stop gun violence. Or to stop Trump. Or to do… well, anything. I mean, the Left are like a coyote that chewed off three paws but is still caught in the bear trap.

But on reflection, what strikes me is that the “pro-PC” side was represented by Americans with their Constitution and free speech tradition, while the anti-PC side were two citizens of the Commonwealth. It might be because, from their perspective, they can see where we’re headed. In particular, Stephen Fry, being a gay atheist and socialist whose positions were historically not always popular, is very much aware that one’s right to a position should not be dependent on its political popularity.

This piece is an analysis of a David Roberts article in Vox  from last Tuesday which is itself an analysis of a piece from the Niskanen Center’s Jerry Taylor, “Whither Never Trump?”

Roberts addresses the concept of “Never Trump Republicans” (whom he calls NTRs) who clearly do not have influence with the Republican Party in operation but are still there as free agents in the media and political culture. The question is what they’re supposed to do. Roberts brings up Taylor’s article, because Taylor concludes that launching a competitive third party is that much harder than “(scrubbing) the GOP clean of the toxins now surging through its base.” Roberts instead proposes a “pretty obvious” solution: NTRs should vote Democrat. “There are, for all intents and purposes, two parties contending in the American system. If you believe one of them is an existential threat to that system … you should vote for the other one. Because one of them is going to win.”

The obvious point here is that there are no NeverTrump conservatives. There are conservatives (meaning, Trump cultists) and NeverTrumpers (meaning, everybody else). But that NeverTrump group includes libertarians, mainstream liberals, “progressives” who thought Hillary Clinton was problematic or not leftist enough, and a few folks who would have been deemed conservative in the not-too-distant past before “conservatism” meant only blind loyalty to Donald Trump and his Know-Nothing psychology.

That in itself ought to reveal the problem with the argument: You can’t get all of those people into the same party. In the final analysis, Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 is a question of whether you can even get liberals and progressives into the same party.

The other issue with Roberts’ logic- that accepting one of the two parties as an “existential threat” necessarily means voting for the other one in a two-party system- is that it was no less valid in 2016. We didn’t know then what Trump would be like in office, but everybody already knew that Donald Trump was a loathsome, dysfunctional personality with no relevant experience and destructive ideas, and yet he got just enough people in just the right states to get the Electoral College. Now, the anti-charismatic Hillary Clinton is not on the ballot for the midterms and will not be on the ballot in 2020 (we only hope), and Republicans in Congress might have pissed off enough people to overcome right-wing loyalties to that party or hatred of liberals. Still, if your best case for voting Democratic is “the other party is like Satan, only racist”, well, we already knew that, and it still was not enough in itself. And then what?

This means that while non-leftists might need to sit out or vote for the Democrats this time, it does not address the long-term issue. Taylor writes: “Even if self-imposed exile were a comfortable option, it’s probably a self-defeating one for those alarmed about the direction of the Republican Party. Granted, a steady string of decisive electoral defeats would eventually force the GOP to change course or die (the fate of the party in California). But despite what some bullish progressives are beginning to think, a generation-long series of electoral beatings is unlikely. Donald Trump may lose in 2020, but if the party continues along its current path, he would simply be replaced by new and better “Trumps” on the horizon. If past is prologue (and we see no signs that it will be otherwise), Democratic overreach will trigger a Republican resurgence. Only two years after Richard Nixon resigned, after all, the GOP nearly held the White House in an electoral cliffhanger.” (This point by Taylor is conspicuously absent from Roberts’ analysis.)

Roberts also might not have considered that the Republicans he’s asking to just give up and vote Democratic could already be doing so, sotto voce. Several of them, notably Paul Ryan, have announced they’re not even running this year. That does not guarantee a Democratic victory for those seats, but the main thing that guarantees a Republican victory is an incumbent candidate. As for the various political columnists, “real” conservatives already think that anybody who isn’t with the cult is The Enemy, so right-wing pundits have already in effect declared their allegiance by taking pundit jobs with CNN (formerly nicknamed the Clinton News Network) and MSNBC (which is the Clinton News Network).

But Roberts moves on towards the conclusion of his thesis: “America’s dwindling white Protestant majority, facing off against an unwieldy coalition of challengers, increasingly driven to ‘authoritarian, blood and soil politics’ in defense of privilege. … That battle must play itself out. The GOP will only change when white-grievance politics is consistently rejected at the ballot box, as it is in California. Only if that happens will the party be open to change. And if the party wants to change, it will seek reformers willing to return home.

That battle could take years, even decades. But by Taylor’s own reckoning, if the blood-and-soil contingent wins, American democracy could be lost. There is only one alternative to that outcome: the other side winning. Like it or not, there are only two parties that matter in the US. For a Trumpist GOP to lose, the Democratic Party must win. ‘Tis math. So Taylor should suck it up and vote for Democrats — not because he likes their policies, but because the alternative is an existential threat.”

Wrong.

This is exactly the wrong tack to take with people who couldn’t stand your party even when Republicans were sane. For a Democratic partisan to look at the current situation and say that the only solution is to vote for the party that he likes is a bit… convenient.

What isn’t being considered is that perhaps the Democratic Party is the less ugly side of the existential threat. I have said this to liberals many times already, and I’m gonna keep saying it til they finally listen: The problem is that your candidates suck and nobody likes them, including a lot of people on the Left. We can see how awful Republicans are. And in the last election Democrats made the stakes very clear. And they still couldn’t get enough people to vote for them in the right states. Which should have only brought home the point that since the start of the Obama Administration, Democrats lost a record number of state and Congressional races where the Electoral College was not a factor. You’ve established that the Republicans are an existential threat, Democrats. And you lost anyway. And then what?

Blame the rest of the country for not listening to you instead of the other way around?

Yeah, that makes sense.

In dealing with Republican “conservatives”, it has become painfully clear to me that the truth will not penetrate some people’s skulls even if you wrapped it in barbed wire and called it Lucille. But it’s also become clear that even the superficially reasonable liberals aren’t capable of learning from experience. Telling the rest of us to “suck it up” and be good little robots is exactly why the Democrats are not able to take advantage of Republicans’ self-created hell, even if (especially if) everyone already knows that there are only two parties that are worth voting for. But what if neither is worth voting for and the best you can offer is not being an existential threat?

Then what?

The fact that the two-party system was broken even before Trump showed up, and will remain so after he’s gone, is why voting for Democrats or getting rid of Trump isn’t nearly enough (which is a point at the heart of another Vox article from last Monday).

As much as I rag on Roberts, he’s only half wrong. Which is to say he’s half right. But so is Taylor. Roberts is correct to say that in the short term, this broken system can only correct by tilting back towards the Democrats. He is incorrect to imply that that will be enough in the long term (or that the long term doesn’t matter). That is because Taylor is right when he says you cannot depend on the rest of the country to stay with the Democrats for anything but the most imperative reasons (and in the last election, not even then). But Taylor is wrong to say that the vehicle of opposition must be the Republican Party.

As I said last time, anybody who wants something besides the Democratic Party either needs to invest in the Libertarian Party, invest in a whole new right-wing party, or somehow get the Republicans to pull out of the Abyss. Well, we already have a Libertarian Party, and its organization, however small, is still greater than a party that has to be created out of whole cloth. As for the Republicans, you wouldn’t even have a Libertarian Party if people like me thought that the Republicans could be saved. We tried reforming it from within. Gary Johnson tried. Charlie Sykes tried. Jeff Flake tried. They don’t want us. And the various people who don’t like the Democrats but are getting more and more offended by the Party of Trump are asking themselves whether it’s still worth voting for. Just as 2016 was not as much a case of Trump winning as Clinton losing, Democratic coups in states like Alabama and Pennsylvania add up to a growing case of Trump fatigue. And Trump gets as far as he does because he’s actually less repellent to the average voter than congressional Republicans. Support for Republicans among those under 30 is lower than it’s ever been. How are we supposed to claim that this is the Party of Lincoln when they would rather be the Party of Trump? Exactly how damaged and blasted is the party supposed to get before they finally conclude that neo-Confederate authoritarianism won’t pay off? And will they be in any better shape than the Libertarians by that point? The Republican Party is already shrinking. We really ought to let it die.

It can’t die, of course, because we’re effectively allowed only two parties. Someone is always going to prop up this zombie, no matter how many brains it eats, because without the Republicans, we’ll only get to vote for Democrats.

For that to be the long-term solution, the liberal apologists proposing it must assume that the rest of the country will accept the implication that “the only rational choice” is the only choice that they deserve to have. In a democracy.

It might just be the case that the rest of the country will not accept that proposition.

And then what?

“Uncle Sam, I want to know what you doing with my fucking tax money.”

-Cardi B

Last week of course was Tax Day, and I made the mistake of getting into another political discussion on Facebook. I posted one of those memes that quoted on top, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society” and at the bottom it said: “WRONG – Taxes are the price we pay to avoid getting kidnapped by government.”

So one of my liberal friends responded, “No- taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

And I responded with two words: “Or else.”

As I’d said last April 15^th, I can’t agree with the premise that “taxation is theft,” but I get the logic behind it. It makes more sense than saying “paying taxes is patriotic.” Patriotism has nothing to do with it. Resident aliens have to pay federal taxes without being American patriots, and everybody has to pay local sales taxes. As for taxes creating a civilized society, clearly that’s a matter of opinion. What is unquestionably true is that we have never been able to fund a government through purely voluntary contributions, and so for government to exist and do those things that we deem necessary, it has to use law enforcement to get revenue. The main difference between private force and government force is the public’s assumption of government legitimacy. That is the only thing that makes taxation not theft.

If we acknowledge a need for government, that does not mean we all agree that that necessity makes everything government does a necessity. Was the Transportation Security Agency absolutely necessary to our existence before 9/11? And is it actually doing anything productive now?

There is a difference between supporting the government because it is legitimate and treating it as legitimate simply because it IS the government.

On this score, liberals broadly assume that the government is justified in itself, and therefore its actions are assumed to have necessary purpose, and if it acts egregiously, that only proves that The Right People need to be in charge of an ever-expanding system, not that the system has exceeded its justifications.

By contrast, if libertarians act as though taxation is theft, or government is inherently wrong, they are acting on the classical-liberal assumption that government is not infinitely justified in its actions, that it is necessary insofar as it is an improvement on the “state of nature” or rule by the local gang, and that when there is no distinction between the rule of law and rule by force, government loses its necessary claim to superiority over other armed groups.

The problem is that the current state of affairs is neither a case of liberals trying to make government do good things nor right-libertarians trying to impose limits on government. We currently have Republicans in power, and while they have in the past embraced both a Hamiltonian approach to big government and a libertarian sympathy to “small government” and business-friendly law enforcement, what we are seeing from the current Administration is the brazen declaration of conservatism as nothing better than the use of big government for the material benefit of those already in power.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is used by critics as the go-to example of this psychology, for good reason. Among other things, Pruitt used his position to charge the government for repeated travel expenses including a four-day trip to Morocco, ostensibly to promote gas exports when that is not in the purview of the EPA. He is even more famous for charging the government to fly first-class on most of these trips, and for creating a detail of security guards that previous EPA heads did not consider necessary. (In his defense, Pruitt needs to travel separately from the common folk because he’s intensely unpopular.)  More recently, the Washington Post reported that Pruitt charged $25,000 to have a secured phone service or “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” built in his office. The article says, “according to former agency employees, the EPA has long maintained a SCIF on a separate floor from the administrator’s office, where officials with proper clearances can go to share information classified as secret. The agency did not specify what aspects of that facility were outdated, or whether the unit inside Pruitt’s office would meet the physical and technical specifications a SCIF generally is required to have. ”

Your tax dollars at work, liberals.

Not only that, while Pruitt might even exceed his boss’ level of taxpayer-funded decadence, Pruitt as administrator is a very typical example of a Trump appointee maintaining the agency that he was appointed to while serving the opposite of its purpose. Both Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have used their positions to promote the coal industry and other polluters. Perry of course, became famous in 2011 for a presidential candidates’ debate in which he had promised to eliminate three federal agencies including the Department of Energy, except he couldn’t remember the name of that Department.

Now, liberals might consider the conservative-libertarian drive to kill federal agencies to be counterproductive or even crazy. But an Energy Department that did not exist would not be acting as a souped-up Chamber of Commerce and doing so on the public dime and with government authority.

This is not simply a case of reducing the scope (or budget) of a regulatory agency, but preserving its existence (against libertarian ideology) in order to enact policy to the benefit of private groups. Thus the premises of liberal regulatory government are turned against themselves in order to make government actively benefit the people who are supposed to be regulated.

Critics of government, both liberals and libertarians, have used the terms “rent-seeking” and “regulatory capture” to describe how elites turn government’s regulatory power to their benefit, but the modern Republican Party goes far beyond this. Regulatory capture is redundant when you can just BE the government.

Moreover, this is not justified in terms of any free-market ideology, including Randian selfishness. The so-called Captains of Industry are the people most dependent on government for their lifestyle. That which can be granted by government – like, unlimited vacation junkets – can be taken away by government.

And the only way these appointees and corporate beneficiaries can justify a government-sponsored lifestyle is to assume that this is the normal and permanent state of affairs.

When the ruling class considers the rest of the country to be not the source of sovereignty, but an economic resource to be exploited by force, and all parties involved conclude that government is serving no other purpose, that is when revolutions start.

Now, let us all work to make sure that never happens, but if it does, would liberals stand in front of the mob and say, “but without government, who would fix the roads?”

The point is not whether or not we want government to fix the roads or maintain public services. The point is that acceptance of those services is not a blanket justification of government institutions. Justification of government as such is exploited by the same conservatives who say government shouldn’t be spending on poor people, so that they can redistribute income upward and use government force to benefit themselves.

If leftists can’t grasp this distinction between libertarianism and conservatism, let alone the difference between ideal conservatism and what passes for it now, then they can’t complain when the rest of us question the difference between Stalinism and socialism.

Nevertheless, this means that the ultimate burden is on the Right. Because if the “official” right-wing party is going to embrace a level of villainy that Snidely Whiplash would find implausible, it threatens to render any opposition to the Democratic Party establishment illegitimate. Which means that anybody who wants a real opposition either has to invest in the Libertarian Party, create a new center-right party (the new Whigs, maybe?) or convince the “moderate” Republicans in Congress to volunteer for spine implants.

 

It is appropriate that on official Tax Day, I look over the legacy of Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who this week announced he would not run for re-election. This links to Paul Ryan’s mostly consistent support for Donald Trump, since Trump as president was instrumental to Ryan’s long-term goals of cutting taxes and government. Thus Ryan’s decision stands as a verdict on how well his loyalty to Trump paid off for himself and the Republican Party.

The first point, which most pundits haven’t spelled out, is that Ryan’s decision means it is no longer a matter of whether Republicans will lose the House in the 2018 midterms, it is just a matter of how badly. Prior to this decision one could argue that the matter was up in the air. But Ryan’s value to the Republican rank-and-file was his formidable fund-raising ability, and that has been undermined. If Ryan had kept his decision to himself and only retired after the November election results (whether Republicans kept the House or not) he would have been a more credible spokesman for other candidates on the campaign trail. Now even though he’s still going to stump for other Republicans, everyone is going to know that he’s campaigning for them when he won’t run himself.

That in itself leads to a broader implication. The fact that Ryan did not conceal his position until after the election (when he probably would have won his own seat) implies that he saw no point in fighting for the House. This is what gets to the question of Donald Trump’s real effect on Republican policy and its chances of long-term survival. The press has noted for some time that even before the primary process is finished, many Republicans are simply not running for re-election. Including House members who are running for other offices, only 19 House Democrats are resigning or leaving after 2018, compared to 40 Republicans. Democrats need 23 more seats to take the House. Normally the majority party would have the edge because incumbents usually win re-election. By not contesting certain seats, Republicans render them open and thus increase the chances that they’ll go to Democrats. But given the stakes of the last Republican Congress, where Paul Ryan and his caucus gutted many of the regulations on Obamacare and passed a surprisingly unpopular tax cut whose benefits went mostly to the party’s donor class, the stakes for retaining control of the chamber are dire. Why then is Paul Ryan doing something that will do more to hurt the Republican majority than any other single act?

Well, let’s just consider This Week in Trumpworld.

On Monday April 9, the FBI raided the home, hotel room and law office of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on the recommendation of Robert Mueller and the specific permission of Mueller’s supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It has since been reported that several of Trump’s confidants are afraid that Cohen may have taped conversations that prosecutors could use against both him and his boss. And since this (and several other cases) are being processed through state offices in New York, firing Rosenstein or Mueller, or giving a federal pardon to Cohen or other confidants, would not make the cases go away. Then it turned out that Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ former lawyer, Keith Davidson, had also handled a hush-money settlement to a former Playboy Playmate who had an affair with Elliot Broidy, deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. (This was a position also held at one point by Cohen.) Then towards the end of the week, Jim Comey, the FBI director that Trump fired after handing him the election, previewed his new tell-all book by leaking copies to the press, excerpts saying things like  “As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and the truth”, and that when he mentioned the possibility that Russians had taped Trump in a room with two prostitutes, Trump “began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault, a subject I had not raised. He mentioned a number of women, and seemed to have memorized their allegations.”

It’s not looking good. So what do you do if you’re Trump?
Yep, you bomb another country!

As I said after Trump’s last missile wank, almost exactly a year ago, Trump wasn’t trying to send a message to Syria and Russia over Syria’s chemical warfare. He was trying to send a message to gullible American establishment types, including the liberal media, that he was trying to be serious. If he was serious, then there would be more of a broad-based policy for achieving a peace in Syria. The fact that Chump tossed off one missile strike and pronounced “Mission Accomplished” demonstrates that the whole thing is just a diversion.

So why does he need a diversion? And again, why did Paul Ryan throw away the last chance to maintain control of Congress when they and Trump rely on each other for mutual protection?

Maybe it has something to do with what conservative Erick Erickson posted this week as the latest set of catastrophes were coming to light. He talked with a local Republican Congressman who told him “If we’re going to lose because of (Trump), we might as well impeach the motherf**ker”. Erickson goes, “What’s the problem, though? Well, get ready…

“It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really f*cking stupid Forrest Gump. He can’t help himself. He’s just a f**king idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are b*tching about him. He really does see the world as ratings and attention. I hate Forrest Gump. I listen to your podcast and heard you hate it too. What an overrated piece of sh*t movie. Can you believe it beat the Shawshank Redemption?'”

Then consider that for some time, long-time Trumpnik Ann Coulter has been calling herself a “Former Trumper.” She has gone so far as to do an interview with Teh Failing New York Times admitting, among other things, that a $1.3 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill that had hardly any money for Trump’s (alleged) immigration agenda sent her over the edge. “I don’t know what more horrible thing you could come up with than violating your central campaign promise that became the chant and the theme of the campaign that he promised at every single rally. I mean, implementing the principles of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ wouldn’t be more of a betrayal than that.”

Wow, the Jersey casino boss who went bankrupt four times couldn’t follow through on his commitments, and you’re surprised?

It goes to show how damn stupid the Trumpniks are. And by that I’m not just referring to the rednecks on social media who commit eight grammatical errors in a five-word sentence. I’m referring to the articulate people like Coulter, and the Billionaire Stringpullers like the Mercers and the Koch Brothers, who are supposed to be smart enough to know better. And of course I’m referring to Paul Ryan, the supposed “policy wonk.” All of these people wanted to believe that Trump was something other than what he was. And it just ties into the point that while Republicans have spent some time appealing only to a certain section of the country, their long-term problem is that they can’t appeal to everyone in their coalition at once.

Libertarian-adjacent writer Will Wilkerson had a great autopsy in the Times where he went over Ryan’s Faustian bargain with Trump: “Politics isn’t physics, but a governing Republican philosophy that sees it as a moral imperative to slash the budgets of social programs that benefit mainly older and working-class white people is bound, sooner or later, to drive a party of mainly older and working-class white people off a cliff.” The only way Ryan could accomplish his legislative goals was to get a Republican in the White House, and the only one who could get in the White House was the one who least hewed to Republican orthodoxy. “Mr. Trump spotted opportunity in the injured dignity of the Republican base and the feckless irrelevance of the establishment’s agenda. He told Republicans shaken by the reality and risk of downward mobility that they were the only Americans who counted, and that they had been cheated and betrayed. He promised never to cut their Social Security or Medicare, and expressed admiration for single-payer health care. He took their side against immigrant rapists, murderous jihadis, plundering trade deals, dangerous city people and disloyal, condescending elites of all parties and persuasions. He promised to use his billionaire superpowers to rig the economy to their advantage. It didn’t matter that he is a transparently corrupt, bigoted, sexually abusive, compulsive liar. He offered the dignity of recognition, promised to fight, and won. … As soon as Mr. Trump clinched the nomination, Mr. Ryan became as tame as a poodle (but) the Republican majority was crippled from the start by the fundamental conflict between a government-shrinking agenda and the immediate material interests of Republican voters.”

It comes down to the point that the fundamental dynamic of the Republican Party is the conflict between a financial elite that sponsors the politicians and a populist voter base that actually elects them. And there’s only one person who can credibly be listed as both a populist and a member of the financial elite: Donald Trump. (And yes, that means that the policies of the Trump Administration in practice are unbelievably schizoid, but what would you expect?)

The end result is that the “conservative” Republican Party has become a personality cult that invests itself in the whims and vagaries of one man who is well into the second half of his lifespan, rather than in philosophical principles that are supposed to stand the test of time against political fashion. In other words, the opposite of conservatism in theory.

This explains why the various groups in the current Republican tent don’t just prep Mike Pence for the White House (apart from the fact that he may be tainted, too). While the Religious Right guys would love Pence, neither the Koch-style “economic libertarians” nor the Roseanne types who think the Kochs are trying to rob them care all that much about fundamentalist priorities, such as gay rights or what trans people call themselves. (They don’t care that much about queer people, but by the same token, they aren’t strongly motivated to disenfranchise them.) But what the plutocrats, the fundies and the Tea Party working class all want is someone who’s going to fulfill their dreams by cutting through all the dross of the democratic republic and run things the right way – even when they have different ideas as to what that means. They are all desperate for a strongman, even if he isn’t really strong. Or smart. Or politically skilled. And might be compromised by organized crime and the Russians.

Poor little Trumpniks. They wanted a Leader. They wanted a great man on horseback. What they got was Liddle Donnie Clown Boy.

And while Trump retains some popularity in the Heartland, those policy wonks who may disagree with liberals but know how Washington actually works day-to-day have gotten to see how Trump operates day-to-day. And they’re coming around to the realization that he is doing to their party what he did to the Atlantic City gambling industry.

But now that they finally have the White House and both houses of Congress, they’re all in on the philosophy that there is no rule of law and all that matters is being in the biggest gang. There’s just one problem with that attitude.

Republicans aren’t the biggest gang.

Indeed, the deliberate Republican strategy for the past few election cycles has been to game the federal system and their own primary election process to marginalize everyone outside a few set opinions so that anyone who isn’t “politically correct” can’t get nominated and voter ID laws and other schemes limit the potential voter pool for general elections. Rather than try to appeal to the broadest possible group (the way Democrats have been), Republicans purge their own ranks for purity, run on issues that appeal only to the hardcore, then try to make sure that only the “right” people vote for them. And then some of them wake up and realize they’re screwed because no one will vote for them.

This is a serious lesson for any group, Left or Right, that wants to change the system. The knowledge that not everyone is going to agree with you ought to indicate that you aren’t going to retain power indefinitely, and thus you should start with the changes that everyone can agree with and have a chance at enduring, rather than deliberately making radical changes that are guaranteed to piss off everybody who isn’t you. Otherwise, antagonizing the rest of the country on the premise that you’ll get away with it forever not only reduces the chance of you staying a majority, it increases the chance that the opposition will try to roll back everything you did when, NOT if, they take the government back.