Category: Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m just saying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Mueller said again.

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

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

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

Your move, Speaker Pelosi…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It exists!’ he cried.

‘No,’ said O’Brien.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How’s that for clickbait?

On June 21, writer E. Jean Carroll publicized her new book on the website of New York magazine, saying that of all the “hideous” men who have mistreated her in life, Donald Trump was the worst, because “in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996″ they had a playful encounter in the Bergdorf’s department store that led to a fitting room where Trump forced himself on her, ” (thrusting) his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.” So a career writer in a major metropolitan magazine has just accused the President of the United States of rape. Or as we call it these days, “Friday.”

You notice I did not use the term “alleged rape.” Frankly, the fact behind the rumor is irrelevant.

I am frankly not sure that Carroll is credible. Her prose is flippant even now and very much so in describing the event. There are always certain questions that, rightly or wrongly, come up when a rape accusation is made many years after the fact, namely: Why now? Why did you wait so long? Carroll answers for herself: “Because I am a coward.” But also: ” I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.”

Over the course of the last week, a whole bunch of media types have been taking their own profession to task about how little attention they are allegedly giving this alleged event. The thread of discussion underlies that the subject is not really being neglected at all. The fact of the matter is that an accusation is simply an accusation without proof, and there is none. And if this were any other President with the likely exception of Bill Clinton, the accusation would provoke horror, or at the other extreme, laughter. The fact that this accusation is treated by many as no big deal is the real verdict: it IS no big deal. The fact of whether Donald Trump raped somebody is irrelevant to the point that most of us consider it likely that he could.

In common-law countries, an accused is always legally innocent until proven guilty. In the social arena, this is normally also the case. But that depends on the individual’s reputation, or social capital, which is earned or squandered by one’s deeds. And when the accused lies literally every day, has been under investigation or lawsuit for most of his life for his crooked business deals, is currently being investigated by Congress, has been married three times, was proven to have paid off two women in the 2016 campaign to not tell stories about their affairs with him, and actively cultivates the image of being a disgusting pig, we cannot be surprised that any charge against him, no matter how horrible, is believable. Especially since, as with the Daniels and McDougal affairs, the rumors usually turn out to be true.

It also doesn’t help that the accused reacted the way he did. Speaking to reporters, Trump prefaced his remarks with “I’ll say it with great respect” – like how he said “some” Mexicans are good people – ” Number one, she’s not my type.” The implication of course, being, “Now, if she was my type? Sure, I’d rape her.” This attitude does not exactly reinforce credibility.

Both legally and socially, the burden is on the party making an accusation against a target. If the target’s reputation was previously clean, the social burden may be too much to surmount. But if facts become clear, and they do not favor the accused, then the burden is on the accused, whether he is legally guilty of anything or not.

This is probably what Republicans realize when they defend Trump. He has no credibility, so they have to lend him theirs. The joke of course being that if the respectable cloth-coat Republicans still had credibility with their own base, they wouldn’t have nominated Trump. Such credibility they still have is with the mainstream media who see them as something other than the jeering redcaps at Trump rallies, who actually love him all the more the more transgressive he gets, like G.G. Allin with nuclear weapons. And yet, people are acting like there’s such a thing as shame. Republicans, who have traded in shaming their enemies for so long, refuse to acknowledge it now. All they have to do is deny. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said, “I know the president has said this is not true … yes I believe the president.” Mitt Romney said, “The president indicated that this did not occur and that’s I think his strongest point to make.” Yes. It WOULD be. Normally. Trump is not a rapist. In exactly the same way that O. J. Simpson is not a murderer.

And it is testimony to how broken and scared the Republicans are that they continue on this path, when they ought to know better. Of course, when your leader is accused of something horrible, and there’s no REAL proof of it, you deny it. But as so many people say, this is not normal. Or rather, abnormal is the new normal. And we should quit acting as though normal is normal. Why do Republicans keep going further and further out, putting their own credibility on the line? Of course there’s no evidence that Donald Trump could do such a thing. EXCEPT for everything we’ve found out about him since he ran for president, and everything that New York reporters had found out about him years before, but did not stress until he became a threat to their profession, and incidentally, the nation. But these guys continue to insist there’s no proof of what E. Jean Carroll is saying. Just like there was no proof of what Stormy Daniels was saying. Until there was. Just like there was no proof of the Karen McDougal story. Until there was.

There’s no proof that Trump was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, either.

Just saying.

A friend of mine posted this liberal article on Facebook: The Trouble With Normal Is It Always Gets Worse. I agree with much of it, but argue with this part of the text, quoting another Lawyers, Guns & Money post:

“Regardless of his supporters we have to keep talking about these rapes over and over and over because otherwise we accept the implicit framing that it’s somehow okay or that there’s some kind of non-legal statute of limitations on holding someone accountable for rape.

In other words we normalize it. We normalize rape. Rape.

That’s not okay. I understand that we live in a rape culture and that rape and sexual assault are to some degree already distressingly normal and normalized, but this is different. This is not hidden or glossed over or anything. It’s an open accusation, both credible and substantiated by what she said at the time, and consistent with over a dozen other accounts.

We need to keep talking about it. A lot. Because if we don’t we give the message that you can get a free pass on rape if you just…do it enough times that people get tired of hearing about it, or stonewall and lie about it no matter how obviously.

If I had a media platform I would consider calling him “Credibly accused rapist and president Donald Trump” on a regular basis.

Like it or not many people, including children, take their cues from ‘leaders.’ What message are we sending if we say “if you’re important enough it doesn’t matter if you rape someone, because holding you accountable is too inconvenient” on such a public scale. I understand that’s a message we send frequently in other situations but it’s one we must resist.

Trump cannot be allowed to get away with the moral equivalent of the Gish gallop. Not on this.”

But he IS getting away with it, because we will not normalize this. We are so desperate to say that things are okay, that we will not admit what’s in front of our eyes. Everyone wants to have it both ways, especially the Good Christians ™ of the Party of Trump, who want the benefits of political dominance without the social consequences that they were all screaming and yelling about when Bill Clinton was in charge.

The only way out is through.

All the professional Christians are going to have to embrace the consequences of their actions and admit that THEY FORCED THIS ON THE COUNTRY, Because Hillary and Because Abortion, and they want to do it again Because Trannies and Because Drag Queen Story Hour.

Everyone is going to have to normalize this. They are going to have to look themselves in the mirror and admit that Donald Trump is a squealing, shit-covered little piglet. That is not a value judgment. It is a fact. The value judgment is what the country is going to DO about it. The value judgment is where you look yourself in the mirror and decide that such a creature should or should not be President of the United States.

And if you’re okay with it, then the problem is not with Donald Trump.

Where is the problem? With the person in the mirror.

Given that over a dozen Democrats had announced a 2020 presidential campaign before January, former Vice President Joe Biden took his time before considering his own run. Given his age (he would be even older than Donald Trump if elected, and Bernie Sanders would be even older) and his many, many political gaffes, not to mention actual policy mistakes, there would be a lot of reasons for him not to run and a lot of reasons to suspect he could lose to Trump even if he won the Democratic nomination. Yet he has decided to run, and with his name recognition, he is looking like the candidate to beat.

The political-media complex is not impressed, because as much as anybody else in the race, Biden, in all his Old Whiteness, is everything they think the political system doesn’t need. Just this week, Vox had an article entitled “Why so many Democrats are running for president” – sub-headed, “The epidemic of random white men running for president, explained” – and splashed it with a montage photo showing at least 11 candidates, five of whom are women and only three of whom are white men.

According to a Friday poll in The Hill, Biden is supported by 35 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, followed by Bernie Sanders at 18 percent – the only other Democrat to reach double digits in preference. In another poll, Biden actually leads Sanders among younger (under 30) black voters, 35 to 30 percent.

Which shows that for all the “progressive” obsession over intersectionality and people “of color”, most black people who do vote vote for Democrats, and usually mainstream Democrats, the same way that union people vote for Democrats and anti-abortion people vote for Republicans: Because they can’t afford to divide their focus. Just as anti-abortion people don’t waste their time with a Democratic party that is broadly pro-choice and prefer a Republican Party that caters to their position, even if they don’t necessarily agree with all Republican policies. Likewise even black voters who might count as conservative on some issues and disagree with Democrats know not to waste their time on a Republican Party that has no time for them, when it isn’t deliberately catering to racists. And they want to vote on the candidate they think will win. Whether that candidate is this week’s hip new flavor is less important than whether people outside the hip circle know and like them.

This also leads to another implication: That not everybody who opposes Trumpism is a “progressive.” Both leftists and “conservatives” have a vested interest in overstating the progressive influence on the mainstream Democratic Party, because “progressives” claim to speak for everybody and Republicans think that they can tar their opponents by association. But, especially as the Republicans purge anybody who isn’t increasingly ideological (read: Trumpnik) the majority of the country is not conservative, but it isn’t necessarily leftist, either. And in the system that the two parties have created, Democrats have to balance their self image as the “progressive” party with the practical reality of being the designated NotRepublican party. And if they want to win, they need to emphasize the factors that everyone, not just leftists, can agree with.

In this respect, the fact that Biden is “problematic” by the standards of the professionally offended is kind of a plus. When the Left kills its own initiatives and knife-fights itself to death with purity tests, you don’t have anything to worry about with Uncle Joe, because you know he’ll never pass a purity test. In fact, I’ve seen several commentators say words to the effect that Joe Biden is the Democrats’ version of Trump. And frankly, I think that’s what he’s counting on. I mean, Trump DID win, didn’t he? And he beat not only Clinton but a whole host of stuffed-shirt establishment Republicans who were always concerned about doing things the right way and presenting the right image and not making any mistakes. If Biden’s biggest problem is his gaffes, well, Trump has pretty much erased the idea that there’s any such thing as “too mistake-prone” to be president.

I’m just saying, if we HAVE to have an old, white politically incorrect doofus as President, why not the one who isn’t a racist Russian tool?

And as I’ve already said: Any Democratic candidate (well, except DeBlasio) would not only be a better president than Trump, they would be better than Hillary Clinton. Any one of them would have a more genuinely progressive record than Clinton. And if Biden doesn’t win, or if he does but he turns out to be too old to serve his term, voters have an excellent range of alternatives and if Biden does win, he has an excellent farm team of potential running mates and successors.

But given all the reasons for why a Biden campaign (or Administration) would not be the nightmare that “progressives” fear, I do want to mention one area where I agree that Biden is problematic.

Since I am a right-winger, I do not oppose the Party of Trump for the same reasons that “progressives” do. I do not think that capitalism is inherently evil, or that taxes and government are inherently good. And if it can’t be the Libertarians, I want at least SOME other party in this country besides the Democrats, because I do not want political ideas to be limited to a conflict between Corrupt Hack Democrats and Social Justice Warrior Democrats. The reason I hate the Party of Trump is because they threaten to marginalize any political viewpoint to the right of MSNBC. And that’s one area where I agree with “progressives.” We realize that the Republican Party has turned into a Snidely Whiplash cartoon of itself, which, far from promoting a smaller government, demands a more encompassing, less accountable and more oppressive government so that they can impose their social agenda on the majority of the population that opposes them, including non-progressives.

And it needs to be emphasized that this is what Republicans WANT. Against the wishes of the “donor class” and the other conservative intellects who know better, the base has taken over the operation. Rather than accepting abortion as a rally-the-base campaign issue that is never going to be seriously dealt with after election year, they are now demanding outright abortion bans to directly challenge Roe v. Wade. Rather than simply using Iran as a rhetorical punching bag to bolster their patriotic credentials, they’re gearing up for war with a country that is far more organized (and far larger, and far more mountainous) than Iraq. Because after a generation of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, conservative intellect has taken a backseat to grievance media and “owning.”

It matters that someone like Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. However evil someone like Mitch McConnell may be, even he didn’t have the brass to outright destroy political norms the way Trump did. But the fact of the matter is, Trump could not have done that without the Party backing him up. Before Trump, this was the same party that primaried out anti-abortion conservative Senator Bob Bennett in Utah, in favor of “Tea Party” conservative Mike Lee. This was the party that frequently railed against anti-abortion conservative war hero John McCain as a “RINO.” Donald Trump did not run for President in 2000, and he did not support Pat Buchanan in 2000, because Buchanan was endorsed by David Duke. Because then both Trump and the Republican Party knew better. Even in 2016, Trump was at least capable of entertaining ideas that would have been Republican heresy (like healthcare reform and gay tolerance). But since inauguration, all those big ideas dissolved, along with the idea that Republicans had an alternative to the ACA, or an infrastructure plan, or even a plan for a Wall. The Trump Administration in practice has been the worst of all worlds: all of Trump’s stupid ideas (like a government shutdown that senior Republicans didn’t want, and tariffs that businesses don’t want) and various federal initiatives for the Paul Ryan wing of the party, not to mention priority shifts in Washington and state legislation to slake the fundamentalist/Mike Pence wing of the party.

Now, since Republicans are basically pack animals, they will follow the leader whether that leader is Trump or Mitt Romney. But it matters what standard that leader sets. And Trump’s standard is to act like laws, norms and reality itself simply don’t apply to him. And Republicans – including those who would otherwise not be Trumpniks – go along with this because this gets them the policies that they want, which would really not be possible under a Bush or a Romney or any other cloth-coat Republican who believes that reality is a thing that exists. And since their White Trash Savior seems to be invincible, any Republicans who would have moral qualms about this know that they’ll be curbstomped out of the primaries if they dare to sass the Leader, so they go along too.

But again, the sane people were getting purged even before Trump showed up. The idea that there is more than one legitimate party was getting purged at least as early as Newt Gingrich, and we are now seeing the full results of that attitude. As I and many others have said, many times and many ways, Trump is not the aberration in the Republican Party. He is the norm. He is just the first one who’s willing to admit it. And again, given his heterodoxy on a few issues, I could argue that the Party has influenced Trump more than the other way around.

And the problem with Joe Biden’s premise, as most recently expressed in his May 18 campaign announcement, is the idea that we can have unity and harmony when the Democrats have always campaigned on that concept, and the reason we don’t have unity is because Republicans don’t want it, because it doesn’t work for them. Unity and harmony requires keeping Republicans in power as though they believed in shared responsibility, when they shirk responsibility and only seek power for ulterior motives.

Just this week, black activist Bree Newsome Bass tweeted, “Please ask yourselves why Democratic leadership is committed to telling you how horrible Trump is as a way of raising money for themselves but aren’t committed to actually exercising their power to stop him.”

Why? Maybe it’s the same reason that Democrats pitched a screaming fit over the Electoral College in 2000 but didn’t do anything on the state level in the 16 years between Bush’s election and Trump’s election, or do anything on the federal level when they had the White House and both houses of Congress. Maybe it’s the same reason that Democrats heard Mitch McConnell say he wanted Barack Obama to be a one-term president and then didn’t organize their party to keep Congress and go after McConnell’s seat. Maybe it’s the same reason that they told everyone how horrible Republicans would be for labor, and didn’t concentrate on the Rust Belt states in 2016.

Why do Democrats tell the rest of us that Republicans are horrible in order to raise money for themselves without actually trying to take the Republican majority down? Because that’s what Democrats DO.

You guys are just figuring this out?

It is not libertarians and “progressives” who need to be convinced that the two sides are not the same. IT’S THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. Because while they’ve been waving the bloody shirts to raise funds to support the lifestyle of the political class, telling voters that Republicans are an existential threat to the American way of life, Republicans DO think that Democrats are a threat to the American way of life, and that is why they are doing everything in their power to keep Democrats from having any influence on government ever again.

The strength of Joe Biden as a candidate is the implicit promise that once he’s elected president, things will get back to where they were before. But that is also his real weakness.

“This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

– Donald Trump, quoted after hearing about the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller

So: it’s been a little less than a month since Robert Mueller submitted his investigation on the Trump team to Attorney General William Barr, at which point Barr presented a suspect summary that immediately drew attention to itself. Since then Barr appeared at an April 9 Congressional hearing where he said “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign.

And then on Thursday he felt the need to preface the official release of the actual report with a press conference where he invoked the calming mantra of “No Collusion” and actually said Trump’s actions were understandable in that he felt “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency” – prompting even Chris Wallace at Fox News to say that “the attorney general seemed almost to be acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president rather than the attorney general”.

Why is Barr going to such lengths to stand up for Trump in the face of the Mueller Report? Well, Trump needs all the help he can get.

As promised by Barr’s summary, the Mueller Report is over 400 pages and consists of two parts, the first being the subject of whether candidate Trump conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. On that score, while even Barr asserts that Russia did work to influence the election, and the Mueller Report goes into great detail on exactly what methods they used, they conclude that no direct coordination took place. So, Russian ops (a group called the IRA) “represented themselves as U.S. persons to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign” and that isn’t coordination because the Trump team could claim deniability. “Trump Campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts and other political content created by the IRA” and that isn’t coordination. “Less than an hour after the (Access Hollywood) video’s publication, WikiLeaks released the first set of emails stolen by the GRU (Russian military intelligence) from the account of Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta” but that’s just a coincidence.

Legally prosecutors might not have met a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard, but to say that all the various efforts of the Trump campaign to get help from the Russian government were not deliberate or intentional is to stretch coincidence to the point that a Storyteller in Mage: The Ascension would slap Trump with an automatic Paradox Backlash and at least one Flaw.

(OK. Most of you didn’t get that. But the two or three people who did thought it was really funny.)

The second section is the kicker. The second subject of the report concerns whether Trump as president obstructed justice in the investigation of the first matter, Russian efforts to tilt the election.

Because if Trump simply happened to benefit from the fact that Vladimir Putin preferred him as president to Hillary Clinton, and that was the extent of their alignment, he could have left it at that. But once president, he continued to change foreign policy towards Russia even as Cabinet members, notably National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, turned out to have Russian ties. The fact that existing FBI investigations on the 2016 campaign continued into the Trump Administration concerned Trump, and he demanded that the serving FBI chief, James Comey, “lift the cloud” that he felt was interfering with his ability to act on foreign policy. When Comey refused to explicitly do so, Trump got Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to write an opinion firing Comey specifying that the termination had nothing to do with the Russia investigation, only for them to see Trump tell NBC’s Lester Holt (on May 11, 2017) that the reason for the firing was over the Russia investigation. (Five days after being played by Trump, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel on the investigation, which is probably just another coincidence.) Among other things, Mueller cites Trump’s remarks and actions concerning Comey’s firing as having “the potential to affect a successor director’s conduct of the investigation.” The report cites Trump’s efforts to remove the special counsel from the investigation, telling Jeff Sessions “you were supposed to protect me” and when Sessions gave him a resignation letter, Trump did not accept the resignation at the time but kept the letter for several days, which then-Chief of Staff Reince Preibus told investigators was like having a “shock collar” on the Attorney General. When Flynn decided to cooperate with the investigation, Trump’s personal counsel asked Flynn to provide a “heads up” in case “there’s information that implicates the President”. At least one case of conduct towards a witness is redacted as “Harm to Ongoing Matter.” Trump’s first campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted on several charges, including witness tampering, after he broke the terms of his plea deal with the investigation.

During the investigation, Trump submitted to only written interview responses to questions on Russia-related topics. He refused to interview at all on the subject of obstruction or his actions during the presidential transition.

In the introductory portions of Section II, Mueller’s report is clear: “Under applicable Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his Article II powers” and: “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

And in the Conclusion, we get the full context of the quote that Barr’s summary made unnecessarily mysterious. Barr quoted Mueller as saying, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Many readers, including me, thought that this snippet revealed much by what it did not reveal. Under the presumption of innocence, why is there a need to specify whether an individual is exonerated? This is the actual paragraph, emphasis mine:

“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Again: it was not Robert Mueller’s job to indict Trump. It wasn’t even the Attorney General’s job. The job of the Justice Department was to present the evidence of Trump’s activities so that Congress could make a proper judgment on whether to impeach the president, which is their responsibility. Contra some liberals, my problem with William Barr is not that he didn’t indict the president. It’s that he has done everything in his power to muddy the waters and stop Congress from making a proper judgment, not least by taking a Mueller conclusion of “we can’t prove that the president obstructed justice because his team eliminated trails of evidence” and presenting it to the public as “he’s totally clean, guys, No Collusion (TM), nothing to see here.”

Needless to say, “We Don’t Want The DOJ To Indict the President Over Shady Stuff That Would Get Anyone Else, Including Bill Clinton, In Front of a Grand Jury” isn’t as snappy as “No Collusion.”

But that isn’t the worst of it.

It doesn’t matter how corrupt or conscientious the Attorney General is when the real problem is that you have a full half of the political system, which represents somewhat less than half the population, openly declaring war against not only the Democratic Party but anybody who doesn’t agree with them all the time. This is of course, not just a matter of Trump, however noxious he is an an individual. It was a matter of Mitch McConnell refusing to even allow a vote on Merrick Garland’s appointment to the Supreme Court, effectively creating an extra-Constitutional precedent that stretches “advise and consent” to the width of a subatomic particle. It has to do with the attempts of various “conservatives” to get around established legal precedent. It has to do with them using their lame-duck time in state government passing last-minute legislation to neuter citizen initiatives and stop Democrats from passing laws when the Republicans in said states were thrown out precisely because voters wanted someone else in charge. And even the Republicans who are not moronic, racist and fascist are still willing to go along with all this, which only serves the actual morons, racists and fascists.

And yet, the Democrats’ House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, told reporters after the release of the Mueller report that impeaching Trump was “not worthwhile” especially since there is going to be an election on Trump next year. And realistically, what it comes down to is that pretty much every Republican in the Senate will vote against removing the president, so the House may as well not try. But THAT’s the issue that needs to be addressed. It never was about Trump. It was about a party that is so power-hungry and desperate that it will even accept a Trump as leader and do anything they can to keep him in charge.

And Democrats will not confront that issue because that would require them to abandon this fantasy that once they win another presidential election, American politics will get back to “normal.” Right. Because once Barack Obama defeated John McCain, the Republicans all sobered up.

Why are these guys not ratcheting up the fight? It’s not just because they’re afraid of losing impeachment in the Senate. It’s because the best and worst tradition of Washington is the bipartisan professional camraderie of the political class, and even though the “bipartisan” part is something of a joke now, Democrats still want to believe in the old sense of courtesy even if Republicans have effectively abandoned it. (This is another reason the old-time Democrats are cool towards Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the other ‘democratic socialists’, because they ran for office after growing up and watching the results of Washington in action, and they didn’t come to be nice and play around.)

There’s also the very relevant point that expecting the president to follow “the rule of law” rather than the precedent of an ever-more-powerful executive would put limits on the president’s power, regardless of which party he or she is in. Both parties crave the powers of the executive more than they fear what the other party would do with them.

But again, Democrats are still under the illusion that there’s a cycle of power-sharing in which they’ll get to turn things around if they wait their turn. These guys have partnered for so long with Republicans in killing any competition for the duopoly racket that they still aren’t willing to grasp that the Republicans are effectively turning them into a “third” party.

And one of the reasons Democrats can’t correct course is because their mindset has mostly worked for them. The strength of Democrats up to this point has been their ability to present their position as not only the “normal” position, but as the only respectable one. And they say, “let’s be sane. Let’s be sensible. Let’s all play by the rules and be normal.” And whatever you might think of Republicans, at least they had the guts to walk up to Democrats and go, “you know, we don’t like your rules, and we don’t think your position is ‘normal.’ So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re just gonna throw all your rules in the air and ignore them like they didn’t exist, cause on paper, they really don’t. And we’re gonna make up our own rules as we go along. And we’re gonna call that the new ‘normal.’ So, how d’ya like them apples?”

Cause the response from the political establishment so far has been, “well, okay, as long as there’s a normal.”

Anybody who’s ever had to deal with a toxic relationship or a professional sociopath knows how this works. The aggressor basically tries to Stockholm-Syndrome you into accepting their predations as not only “normal” but good, and since they know how much you crave stability and calm, they stir things up and make a mess and terrorize you into succumbing to their demands. “Just give me what I want and everything goes back to normal. Just do what I tell you and then I’ll leave you alone.” (Until the next time they want you to enable them.)

I mean, if you’re not an illegal alien, a trans person in the military, or living in Yemen, none of this stuff Trump does affects YOU, right?
Unless of course it does. But if you’re not a Republican, you don’t count.

I’m just saying, that if liberals are going to keep chanting, “this is not normal,” then maybe they should ACT like it.

That doesn’t mean they should scream and cry and riot, or do anything un-Constitutional. It means they act according to the law, but they also act according to the stakes. If Capone puts one of yours in the hospital, you put two of his in the morgue. And rhetorically speaking, the next year or so leading up to the election presents a great opportunity to do that.

After all, if Mueller and his Crazy Democrat Trump Haters got nothing on Trump, if Trump had nothing to hide, and if the last time the opposition party impeached a president, they got shellacked at their next midterm election, why NOT push for impeachment, just to get it over with? Why was Barr trying so hard to spin this as being less than it was, if it was really nothing at all? If Trump’s got nothing to worry about, because all the Senate Republicans will take his side and put a cloud on the Democrats by giving Trump the win, why not call the Democrats’ bluff?

Because it’s really the Republicans who are bluffing.

Whereas in the 2018 midterms, Democrats had to defend 23 Senate seats and the Republicans only had to defend 9, in 2020, Republicans will be defending 22 seats and Democrats 12. Even though the Republicans had a net gain of Senate seats in 2018, the factors that favored them in 2018 – the staggered schedule of elections and the much tighter margin in a chamber of 100 versus the 435 in the House – now work against them. In the unlikely event that Democrats win seats while Trump wins election, Democrats will need a net gain of four seats to get the majority. If a Democrat is elected Vice President (and their Vice President is able to break ties) their party will only need three more seats for a majority.

And Republicans – certainly Mitch McConnell – know that they need the Senate as much as they need the White House, if not more so. That’s pretty much how they kept their party alive and kicking when Obama was president. They’ve been this shameless this long because as long as Trump is more asset than liability, they have no reason to abandon him. So he has to be made a liability. If, as strict evidence suggests, Trump merely benefited from Russian election interference without directing it, but he did and continues to work against any investigations of Russian activity in the US and elsewhere, past and present, then whatever one thinks about the 2016 election, Trump’s current conduct is a national security issue. And if Republicans are going to wrap themselves in the flag and defend “our” president against impeachment, it has to be emphasized that they are doing so in the face of that national security threat. If they want to make impeachment an issue against Democrats – and they will whether Democrats want to impeach or not – then Democrats need to make the Republican posture an issue against them. Make it clear: If you vote for a Republican for the Senate (or any other office) you are choosing Trump over your country. Make it clear that all the crazy evil that is happening to this country is only because the Republican Party – very specifically, the Republicans in the Senate – want Donald Trump to stay where he is. And make it clear to politicians and voters that the very same people who defend Trump now are the very same people who said, correctly, 20 years ago that a womanizing pathological liar and real estate cheat was morally unfit to be the president, and it is now time for those people to either live by their words or eat them.

If Republicans want Donald Trump so damn bad, make them OWN him.

No more of the Good Christians fretting and posturing that of course they want a godly president, but they’ll give King Cyrus a “mulligan.” Make them admit that Trump IS what they want because he is what they wanted years before he actually ran for office. Make them take responsibility for their mindset, of which Trump is merely the most obvious example. Of course, neither he nor they want to take responsibility for anything, so Republicans in the Senate will have to make a choice: Do they love Trump more than their own jobs?

I think we all know how they’ll answer that question, but forcing them to actually answer it in public will force them, and the Democrats, to acknowledge the stakes.

But, I could be wrong. Maybe Trump knows more than I do. He’s gotten away with everything so far. So given that the discussion of impeachment is inevitable, and he seemed to think that making himself the focus was how he saved the Senate (even as he lost the House) maybe forcing impeachment is how Republicans achieve victory. In fact, I’ve even got a re-election slogan picked out for him:

Trump 2020: Because You Can’t Spell “Impeachment” Without ‘Peach’

Among the over a dozen folks who have announced themselves as candidates for president in the Democratic Party race, one who’s been getting a lot of attention is centrist Pete Buttigieg, the well-regarded “Mayor Pete” of South Bend, Indiana. Having launched an exploratory committee in January, Buttigieg announced a fundraising total of 7 million dollars by April. This was followed up by a CNN town hall event in which Buttigieg’s performance impressed a lot of people, leading to greater press coverage and favorable attention.

This has led to consternation in some quarters. Paste Magazine writer Jacob Weindling, a self-declared socialist, wrote an article last week on the subject that “Pete Buttigieg Is Not a Progressive.” In the lead paragraph, Weindling lays out his thesis: “The word “progressive,” means something. It’s not just the basic definition of moving progress forward, but it is a political ideology that stands opposed to the tenets of the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism approaches politics from the standpoint that the capitalism-based status quo is worth preserving, and policy focus should be on fixing its deficiencies around the edges. Progressivism takes the attitude that the status quo is the problem, and the only solution is to get rid of the system perpetuating the unsustainable status quo. “

But that just gets to the point. I am NOT a “progressive.” I am not a Socialist. I am a conservative in the sense that I want to preserve the American system of government. I am a libertarian in the sense that I believe in The Law of Unintended Consequences, and in the sense of Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least” and what someone else believes “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words I am what Jefferson and F.A. Hayek would call a liberal.

But if “conservatism” has degenerated into the power-worship of wannabe fascists, the term liberalism has been co-opted by what would properly be regarded as social democracy in Western Europe. And really, it has even less to do with that than what Weindling describes as “the attitude that the status quo is the problem” because when American leftists talk about how (say) national health care is a radical leftist position here but a mainstream position in Europe, they elide the point that a social safety net IS a mainstream position in Europe – which in some cases has conservative roots. This model is certainly more redistributionist than how things are done in America, and thus problematic to the Right, but it is not “socialist” in the Leninist or even anarchist sense, because it does not result in the workers seizing the means of production – at best, workers’ parties seize control of the government and it redistributes the profits of business. The point is, you can’t redistribute capital if there is no capital to redistribute. European systems preserve the “status quo” that actual socialists wish to destroy because you can’t have all the things they say are good about socialism without a capitalist system to finance them.

To say nothing of the other issue with “progressivism”, a term I normally use only in quotes. The progressive movement is so devoted to its own analytic concept of “justice as fairness” that it disregards the context of things, such as, that not everybody regards the leftist position as self-evidently good, that not everybody agrees with the current fashions of gender theory, the demand for reparations, socialist economics, and so forth, and that even those who are moderate and tolerant will eventually be alienated by a movement that demands everything go its way. The words of Hayek are relevant here: “To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits. I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion. This may also explain why it seems to be so much easier for the repentant socialist to find a new spiritual home in the conservative fold than in the liberal.”

Because the Left has that illiberal, fundamentally anti-American dark side – however sublimated it appears in comparison with right-wing lunacy – Republicans can still try to make hay out of how “socialist” the new generation of Democrats are. It’s just that that party has staked its future, and the world’s future, on the risk that their precious little boy will literally shit himself on national TV, which he figuratively did this week.

By contrast to Weidling, Andrew Sullivan had a Friday column in nymag.com that presented Buttigieg in a more positive light. Sullivan being Sullivan, he frets that any candidate who cannot address the immigration issue will lose to Trump, but he thinks that Buttigieg seems to be the most likely to support e-verification and a path to citizenship as opposed to effectively open borders. He also appreciates his demographics (‘my gay hack for pronouncing his name is to think of him as a ‘booty judge.’) and sees his political career so far as proof, like Obama’s, that “in America, we can still unite in a more humane consensus.” This is perhaps better explained in an earlier New York article by Ed Kilgore, “Without a Plausible ‘Theory of Change,’ Progressive Ideas Are Just Fantasies.” This piece in turn analyzed the interview that Buttigieg did with Ezra Klein at Vox, quoting Buttigieg as saying that the central lesson of Barack Obama’s presidency is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.”

This just gets to the point that the two-party process has reached its limit of absurdity as Republicans in particular campaign only on negative terms and in office can only act to stymie Democratic initiatives. Even if some Republicans knew better, they don’t want to be part of a process where a Democrat president could take credit for the results, and they certainly don’t want to be primaried out of office by people who think that Rush Limbaugh is a pinko. Now, I didn’t always agree with Obama, but I think he was temperamentally the sort of president I could get behind. It’s just that the Republican Party had already decided on its radical course by the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and they were going to oppose Obama for being a Democrat even if he wasn’t young and black (though obviously that didn’t help). I argued that Obama’s (generically) conservative temperament was good on the whole but left him unable to challenge his enemies even when it was clear that they wanted to destroy everything he supported. In his article, Kilgore says that the most important matter for the next president is not so much what a candidate wants to do as how they plan to do it, pointing out that Buttigieg, for one, would endorse “process” changes like eliminating the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster so that the results of the popular vote are better expressed in action, whereas the “radical progressive” Bernie Sanders would keep both institutions as they are, and thus be less likely to succeed in a country where Republicans have any support at all. The articles on Buttigieg aren’t very clear on exactly how he would enact these changes, since they would require both houses of Congress, but he is at least trying to size up the issue when Obama didn’t even seem to recognize it.

The fact that Buttigieg is gay and married to a man is by now incidential to most people, and obviously doesn’t give him extra weight with “progressives,” even as it would drive most “conservatives” up a wall. In that, Buttigieg resembles Obama, since most people didn’t care about his race, “progressives” still found reason to criticize him even though he was the first black president, but the conservative faction was driven literally insane by his very existence. What this really comes down to is not that the country is becoming “polarized” or skewing to the Left. Again, liberals: most of the country doesn’t agree with you, either. If you’ve now come to believe that a financially corrupt poon hound is unfit to be president, and that his presence in the office coarsens the culture, maybe you now realize that the conservatives were right about Clinton then. It’s just that since 1998, conservatives took the wrong lesson from that. Now they’ve come to believe that since power justifies everything, everything is justified for the sake of power. And if the rest of the country seems to be going more Left, it’s only because the Right is already radicalized and cannot be dealt with in good faith.

The other thing is that the setting is different than the 2016 election. Whereas the Democrats’ position in 2016 was “you’ll get meatloaf again, and like it” now you have the opposite problem where voters have a surfeit of choices. And in this case, every Democrat currently running in 2016, possibly including Joe Biden, could be nitpicked to death by “progressive” purists. But every one of them, including Biden, has a more actually progressive policy record than Hillary Clinton, and any one of them arguably has a better resume.

So Pete Buttigieg isn’t a progressive. Who cares? And why should anyone care if Joe Biden apologizes for being handsy? When the orange toadstool in the White House actually brags about how awful he is? Most of my social media friends don’t talk about Biden’s reputation with women, or Cory Booker’s history with Big Pharma, or Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of staff. They ask, “is this person better than Trump? And could they beat Trump?” The first goes without saying, the second has to be determined.

To reiterate: I’m not a Democrat. I am not a liberal in the American sense of the term, because I am not a “progressive.” So I don’t think I am going to change my Libertarian registration to vote in the Democratic caucus/primary round, because any one of these people not only would be better than Trump, more to the point they would be a better president than Hillary Clinton, and would be more likely to run a better campaign than Hillary Clinton. Ironically that’s why I gave up my principles and temporarily joined the Democratic Party in 2016, specifically to vote for Bernie Sanders, because if the binary thinkers are right in assuming that a third-party candidate can’t win, and the non-Democratic candidate was A, Republican, and B, Trump, that made it imperative that the Democrats nominated someone who could deal with Trump, and Hillary wasn’t it. If anything my resentment of Hillary was based on the suspicion in the back of my mind that Bill and Hillary’s old friend Trump was coached to be an anti-Hillary “straight out of Central Casting” to rally her feminist base and discredit the Republicans once and for all. What she didn’t anticipate is that Trump got more attention and praise than he deserved precisely because he was the anti-Hillary and could present himself as the opposite of what everyone hated about her. If Sanders had been nominated, that wouldn’t have guaranteed he’d win, but he would have had the populist credentials to compete with Trump on that level and would not have had the baggage that Hillary had and that Trump took so much advantage of. The other point in this coming election is that Trump no longer has the advantage of asking “what have you got to lose?” After two years of seeing what he’s actually like with power, a lot of people know exactly what they have to lose, and if all Trump had to do was present himself as the opposite of Hillary, it doesn’t matter how “socialist” or leftist or moderate the Democratic nominee is, since Republicans will present that person as the Commie Antichrist anyway. All said Democrat needs is to be the opposite of Trump.

In this regard, I don’t know if I’d put all my chips on Pete Buttigieg. He is still obscure, but unless we’re talking about Biden, or Bernie Sanders (or unless you watch a lot of MSNBC) most of these guys are obscure. He is not a progressive (at least if you’re one of those folks who defines ‘fascist’ as anything to the right of Che Guevara) but this whole year of pre-primary politics is about Democrats deciding if that’s the direction they want to go. But Buttigieg seems to have the qualities that I (and much of the country) liked about Barack Obama, along with an understanding of the current political situation that Obama didn’t have, and that the next president will need. That’s why I would keep an eye on him.

But I must confess, the real reason I’d like Pete Buttigieg to get the Democratic nomination is so that Donald Trump would have to spend the second half of 2020 trying to pronounce “butty geeg.”

“A new poll states that 55 percent of Americans want to get rid of the Electoral College. However, under the Electoral College, 55 percent of the country is not a majority.”

-Seth Myers, March 21, 2019

As happens on those occasions when Democrats don’t control the White House, liberals have suddenly decided that they need to get serious about killing the Electoral College. Let me do a review on the issues involved.

But first, you will note that I do not base my critique of the Electoral College on the premise that it was intended to be a defense of slavery. That is because too much of leftist critique of America comes down to “but slavery.” Like, all the things that Thomas Jefferson did in and out of public service are invalidated “because Sally Hemmings.” And really, if your whole argument with the founding structure of our government is “because slavery” then you need to acknowledge that the whole Constitution is based on the premise of classical liberals compromising with the slaveholder culture (which in the case of Jefferson, for one, was the same person). And that means that the stuff that you like about the Constitution stems from the same premise as the stuff you don’t like. The premise of the Constitution set the stage for what we now call “democracy,” but the government was never intended to be a democracy in either the modern or classical sense. And if you’d rather destroy the Constitution, you should really vote Republican, because they’re doing a much better job with that than the most anti-American leftists.

To be sure, a huge amount of why our government looks the way it does is because the people who wanted a strong central government (mostly in Northern ‘free’ states) had to convince Anti-Federalists and states-rights advocates (in Virginia and other slave states) that giving up some of their sovereignty was worth it. That led to things like the “Three-Fifths Compromise” and other atrocities. But it also needs to be considered that without such concessions we either would not have had a Constitution (and stayed with the ‘states-rights’ Articles of Confederation) or we could have ended up with a Confederate secession 76 years earlier.

In any case, most of the Constitutional rules specifically protecting slavery were ended by the Reconstruction Amendments. The Electoral College was not one of them. And that’s because federalism (the protection of states within a national government) was not the issue on trial. Critique of the EC on grounds including the protection of institutional racism is not automatically invalid, but is is also not automatically valid.

There are two reasons given in promotion of the Electoral College, only one of which has borne out.

The first is that by making the election of the president a state-by-state process rather than a national popular vote, we get a better representation of the country’s demands. If elections can be determined mainly by the votes in New York City and California, that would be “democracy” in the sense of gross popular vote, but people in the states in between wouldn’t find that very representative. This also undermines the ‘it’s all about slavery’ argument: one reason the Founders had to include the slavery faction in the debate on federalism is because the slave states had too much (white) population and influence to ignore. If anything, the white-supremacy faction in modern politics clings to the EC because their numerical advantage no longer exists. Which would seem to be a defense of the pro-slavery position, but if we’re going to say that the debate should no longer be in terms of the 1780s, we should also say that the original context no longer applies.

Which leads to the second point. The second argument for the Electoral College, enumerated by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist No. 68, was that:

“as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.

…The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.“

But as the 2016 election showed, this institution, intended to counter “cabal, intrigue and corruption”, and to prevent a creature of “foreign powers” from demagoguing his way into control of the Republic despite having no talents except “low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” was the very mechanism by which that undesired result occurred. And the best case that can be made against the Electoral College is that the only reason the event it was designed to prevent occurred is because of the very existence of that institution, and that the republic (as well as small d-democracy) would have been better served by a national vote.

The problem there is that just as the racist defense of an Electoral College system isn’t quite the same as the Anti-Federalist opposition to the federal Constitution, the leftist critique of the Electoral College elides the point that it is not quite the institution that the Federalists intended. I had already gone over this at least once, after the election, analyzing the opinion of Art Sisneros, a conservative Texas elector who ultimately wimped out and resigned rather than vote against Trump, but who indirectly explained why the Electoral College is not what it was intended to be. You see, the Founders, coming off their experience with the British parliamentary system, had decided (with some reason) that official partisanship distorted the political process, but rather than either account for it in the new federal Constitution or find some official counter for it in the checks-and-balances system, they simply ignored the possibility and hoped (like Washington) that people would simply choose to avoid it. That turned out not to be a realistic hope. After Washington left the Presidency, the original Constitution dictated that the second-place winner of the presidential (Electoral College) vote would be the Vice President, but this meant that in 1796, President John Adams had to serve with his political rival (second-place finisher) Thomas Jefferson as Vice President. Things got even worse in 1800 when Aaron Burr ran against Jefferson and tied the Electoral College vote. The matter went to the House, where things remained in deadlock until (ironically) Jefferson’s other rival, Hamilton, supported his election because he distrusted Burr more. This is why one of the first Amendments after the Bill of Rights, the Twelfth Amendment, was passed, confirming that the President and Vice President are to be elected separately. In the process, this also confirmed the partisan nature of the process. A separate but related development was the “evolution to the general ticket.” Hamilton’s Federalist proposal was that the people were ultimately voting for the Electors, who were better qualified to make a final decision on the Presidency. However some state governments decided that the presidential candidate favored in their state would have a better chance of winning if all Electors were pledged to the victor. In his column, Sisneros quoted Wikipedia:

“When James Madison and Hamilton, two of the most important architects of the Electoral College, saw this strategy being taken by some states, they protested strongly. Madison and Hamilton both made it clear this approach violated the spirit of the Constitution. According to Hamilton, the selection of the president should be “made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station [of president].” According to Hamilton, the electors were to analyze the list of potential presidents and select the best one. He also used the term “deliberate”. Hamilton considered a pre-pledged elector to violate the spirit of Article II of the Constitution insofar as such electors could make no “analysis” or “deliberate” concerning the candidates. Madison agreed entirely, saying that when the Constitution was written, all of its authors assumed individual electors would be elected in their districts and it was inconceivable a “general ticket” of electors dictated by a state would supplant the concept. Madison wrote to George Hay: ‘The district mode was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted; & was exchanged for the general ticket.'”

The process of choosing electors in correspondence with popular vote began in 1789 with Pennsylvania and Maryland although district voting in other states continued through the 1800s. As of now only Maine and Nebraska use a district system for electors, although even these rules are fairly recent (Maine passed its election law in 1972 and Nebraska changed theirs in 1996).

To Hamilton, this process defeated the whole point of the Electoral College system; rather than rendering the heated process of popular vote subject to deliberation from an objective body, objectivity was eliminated in order to facilitate the partisan process, which he had warned would allow the “little arts of popularity” to prevail and encourage the selection of the unqualified.

The irony is that the attack on the EC is coming from liberal Democrats on the grounds that it thwarts democracy, but as Sisneros implies in his column, the change, along with several “Progressive” measures in American history, was intended to make the process more democratic. “Conservatives aren’t much better. They don’t mind that the representatives in a republic exist as long as, contrary to Webster’s definition, no “power is lodged in their representatives.” They want the power in the people directly. The representatives are only there to do what the people demand. They want a democracy, not a republic. They want the power to vote for Skittles for dinner. This is evident by how they approach their legislators. They want them to do X, Y or Z because that is what “we the people” demand. The Constitutionality of it only matters when the legislators are listening to another faction of their constituency. “

This touches on the point that in American politics, we confuse the popular and academic definitions of “democracy” and “republic,” a confusion that is often encouraged by the political class. It at least explains how the same people who bray “it’s a republic, not a democracy!” will in the next breath whine that anybody who wants a Republican president to follow the rule of law is “thwarting democracy!”

And if as leftists insist, it all comes down to racism, that’s not necessarily because that was the specific intent of the Electoral College system. Rather, the people who think that “democracy” means that only their people get the vote, and who opposed the Federalist Constitution because they would have less rights than they did in the Articles of Confederacy – which is why they later formed the Confederate States of America – are using the anti-majoritarian premises of the federalist republic to get their way against the greater majority nationwide. This only happens because of what George Washington described in his Farewell Address as the dynamic “for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views” and in which “(the) disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As I have said, if there was an Original Sin in the Constitutional system, it was not slavery, which could be and technically was corrected. The original sin was that it did not address the system of party loyalty which was contrary to the American project, and which reactionaries have used to maintain the spirit of institutional racism even when the Constitution allows for it to be corrected by law.

It’s not as though liberals (liberals in general, as opposed to the Democratic Party as an institution) are completely unaware of this, or have not proposed ideas. However, up until fairly recently, the prospect that a popular vote winner could lose the Electoral College was not something seriously considered by the political class. To the extent that it was, it was often Republicans complaining that they would not accept their candidate losing the Electoral College if he won the popular vote. But generally, liberal Democrats had gone along with the system because it is deliberately hard to change the Constitution (although obviously it’s not too hard to subvert it). Not only that, there had been a general impression that they could afford to lose Texas and roll the dice on Florida as long as California and New York were in the bag. Obviously that’s not the case anymore.

There’s also a new article in Vox about a specific alternative. The article by Lee Drutman goes over the various proposed alternatives including the gross national vote (which has much the same ‘first-past-the-post’ issue as non-presidential races). The main proposed alternative would be a two-round system (similar to France) which would basically be a national runoff. Drutman’s proposal is ranked choice voting: in this system, a voter would not vote only once for president but would place their first choice, then their second-preferred choice, third preference, and so on. This has certain advantages over the runoff; first obviously being that the election campaign doesn’t require a second round and would be less expensive. Another benefit is that while runoff voting still creates “first past the post” style issues where voters have to second-guess themselves to avoid “spoiling” a ballot with their preferred choice (which was a possibility for Democrats in California’s last all-party primary round), ranked voting still allows the possibility that a “minor” candidate can be in play without “spoiling” the vote for everyone else. While Drutman does not focus on this, the other implication is that this would also solve a lot of problems with other American elections that have nothing to do with the Electoral College.

All of which is academic (literally and figuratively) because not only is the Constitution deliberately hard to change on paper, the two party process makes it that much harder to change it.

But still, some of these changes can be introduced on the state level without introducing constitutional amendments. It would in theory be easier to make electors proportional to the actual vote in each state, or to introduce runoff or ranked voting than eliminate the EC, and if we minimize the psychology of “first past the post” and blind party loyalty, that would address much of the complaints with the Electoral College right there.

But tribalism is a universal. Motivated ignorance is a universal. The American election system is a particular. And while it, like the Democratic Party, has “worked” well enough for most purposes, its existing weaknesses have only recently become critical, because only now did we have not only a candidate who was so unethical and power-hungry as to deliberately game the system to target its specific weaknesses, but had a сахарный папа with enough resources to help him do it.

And if the position of Democrats is that if you vote for the wrong party, the republic is endangered, then that is not a condemnation of the other party, however rotten and dysfunctional it is. It is a condemnation of a first-past-the-post, two-party structure that incentivizes perverse motivations. This is a structure that began as flawed but workable but due to the machinations of the two ruling parties – one of which has usually been the Democrats – it changed from being merely flawed to an active threat to the intent of a democratic republic.

Typically, Democrats only care about this now that their own self-preservation is the issue, and there are two ironies in that. One, it may be too late. Two, for Democrats to make any headway on electoral reform, they have to risk losing what built-in advantage they still have. And that is a factor that may influence their willingness to proceed.