Category: Politics

After two years of Viceroy Trump living under the cloud of the Mueller investigation – a cloud of his own making, of course – Robert Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr, and as promised, Mr. Barr has just released a summary to Congress and the public. And it would seem to justify the position of the Trump Administration.

Sorta.

According to the letter Barr sent to Congress, the Special Counsel’s report consists of two parts. On the matter of whether Americans (including the Trump campaign) assisted in the Russian conspiracy to influence the 2016 election (the existence of such conspiracy being taken as a given by most of the government), the investigation “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
The second part of the report “addresses a number of actions by the President — most of which have been the subject of public reporting — that the Special Counsel investigated as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns.” In the language of Barr’s summary, “After making a “thorough factual investigation” into these matters, the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as “difficult issues” of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” This left the matter at the discretion of the Attorney General, and in his report, Barr said that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had concluded that there was insufficient evidence to establish an obstruction of justice offense.

The full text, of course, is in the hands of Attorney General Barr, which is why Democrats in government have called for, and continue to call for, the majority of the report to be made public so that its conclusions can be further examined. As they should.

What strikes me is that in a legal system with presumption of innocence, the question of exoneration should not be an issue. The point that the president is not exonerated seems to be an emphasis. The language seems to indicate that they saw a lot of smoke but couldn’t trace the fire.

But all the liberal commentators who emphasized how straight and by-the-book Robert Mueller is should have anticipated that he wasn’t going to go after Trump just for the sake of doing so. Such a person wouldn’t see it as his place to be the linchpin of the American government’s self-correction.
It is not the place of the Department of Justice to impeach and remove a president. If the only way to get rid of the were-yam occupying the White House was through the DOJ, all the little Trumpniks would whine that their enemies were subverting democracy, and for once they would have something like a point.

I mean, put aside the fact that the only reason Liddle Donnie Clown Boy is president is because we’re NOT a majoritarian democracy, but I’m going to get to the Electoral College in another post. There is still a representative process. And if Republicans are going to be accomplices in doing to the American Senate what the Roman elite did to their Senate, if the Democrats can’t strike oil with all the Congressional investigations they now have power to pursue, and if a Democratic nominee can’t defeat Donald Trump in a presidential race now that we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore and we KNOW what he’s like in charge, that would say more about the system than about Trump.

There’s also the point that, as many in the press have pointed out, that this is a long game. This is part of why some of Mueller’s initiatives were “farmed out” to the Southern District of New York and other state prosecutors’ offices that are subject neither to the federal Department of Justice nor a presidential pardon that can only apply to federal crimes. As Ed Kilgore points out in New York Magazine: “Just because Mueller considers a certain batch of evidence not grounds for a prosecution on his own motion doesn’t mean it might not create future legal and political jeopardy for Trump. Other prosecutors pursuing other angles could pick up on his findings. And to the extent that the Justice Department doubts a sitting president can be indicted at all, the report could produce evidence that will sit, ticking like a time bomb, until he leaves office.”

And just think: If the second most incompetent presidential candidate in American political history had just lost, none of this would be happening because he’d just be a whiny little nobody trying to flag his career in “reality” TV and right-wing grievance media, as opposed to a whiny little nobody with the nuclear codes whose pique and incompetence make him a threat to the Deep State, which prior to Trump was simply “the state.”

What that also means is that with all the investigations still ongoing – and with Trump and Jared Kushner still creating new causes for investigation – the stakes for the 2020 election have been raised, whether anyone wants to admit this or not. The turn of events implies that if, for whatever reason, one votes against Donald Trump to remain president, that is a vote for Donald Trump to be criminally prosecuted once he leaves office.

The problem being that some people aren’t willing to confront those stakes, and some of us are a lot more comfortable with turning the election into a referendum on Trump’s prosecution than others.

POSTSCRIPT: And in any event, why do we even need a “beyond reasonable doubt” case that Trump conspired with Russia to swing the election for their benefit when he has proven himself willing to interfere with or recall sanctions on North Korea, with no quid pro quo whatsoever? Which leads to the next question, when your president sucks up to socialists in North Korea (and post-Marxists in Russia and China), wants to build a new Iron Curtain on the border and wants to turn American government into a one-party cult of personality, how can “conservatives” claim to represent the opposite of socialism?

Why isn’t the political-media complex focusing on THAT?

A few thoughts on the mass murder in New Zealand.

It is ultimately too much to expect coherency and consistency from a racist murderer, but given that the individual, like most of his ilk, felt compelled to produce a written manifesto to explain his crimes, his words are still revealing of something.

For one thing, it’s been pointed out that the killer praised Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” What’s less emphasized is the full quote. Asking himself the question, “Are you a supporter of Donald Trump?” he answers, “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.”

So consider that even one of the radicals inspired by Trump and the alternative-to-being-right can see that Trump is great as a race agitator but knows he is a terrible leader and policy maker. Would that the Republican Party had as much integrity and common sense as a murdering conspiracy theorist.

The killer refers to his philosophy as “eco fascism.” The use of such a label is considered by some ecology activists to be a smear on the movement, but as with much else in the manifesto, such language itself implies an intention to antagonize – to troll.

Journalists had detected a similar intention in the racist’s inspiration by YouTube star PewDiePie and American alt-right activist Candace Owens (who is black). Again, there is a lack of coherency and consistency, but there is still a common element. This radical Right philosophy, especially in violence, serves to both support and undermine the concept that radicals of both Left and Right have a common philosophy. Both extreme leftists and extreme-right racists hate the generally liberal center more than they hate each other. Liberalism – both the right-wing “classical liberalism” and the more leftist sort developed through social democracy – endorses a marketplace that both socialists and racists find alienating. More than that, the marketplace philosophy is an outgrowth of Western individualist philosophy that both extremes find alienating and destructive to both the community and the ecology. In that regard, the killer’s philosophy has a certain theme in theory that breaks down in practice, as where he says the government system he most admires today is the Communist government in China, which (largely for political expediency) is one of the most business-oriented, and thus most polluting countries in the world, and has taken this course for the sake of preserving their collectivist political system.

However, the shooter’s actions also reveal a certain difference between the two political camps. The shooter claims to represent a beleaguered minority that can only achieve change through violence whereas more and more socialists embrace the “democratic” label in the hopes of achieving change through the political process.
That right there is another area where the shooter’s stated intentions contradict his actions. The killer, an Australian, said that he deliberately used guns to kill civilians in order to spark a gun-control debate, especially in the United States, hoping to radicalize white people who feel their gun rights are under assault. But to make this provocation, he went to nearby New Zealand, which already has strict gun laws. If anything, the point he makes to right-wingers is that this is what happens when a population can’t defend itself against a guy who didn’t care about the intent of gun laws, indeed, at the second mosque attacked, the shooter was driven off by a guy with a gun. (Granted, it WAS one of the killer’s empty shotguns, that a worshiper picked up and ended up throwing through the window of the shooter’s car.)

But even so, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did call for new bans on semi-automatic weapons in the country. Now did this massacre on the other side of the planet affect the Second Amendment debate in America? Uh, no.

And that’s because, after Sandy Hook, liberals seem to have figured out that the issue is less a debate on the need for gun rights or even the efficacy of gun control. It has to do with the fact that the Republican Party policy is arm-in-arm with the National Rifle Association, which is now more about selling weapons to civilians than protecting the Constitutional right to bear arms. The fact that our debates are more about transient politics than eternal principles can be demonstrated by the point that in 1967, Republican Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed the Mulford Act, which prevented the carrying of loaded firearms in public. At the time, this was supported by the NRA. But then, the radicals with guns were Black Panthers.

The fact of the matter is that the people who agree with the shooter are getting what they want through the political process in the United States, or at least they were before the 2018 midterms. And if such people wish to condemn democracy as flawed, they have a point, but not the one they intend.

So once again, there is a schizoid discrepancy between philosophy and actions, the only common element being a hatred of modernity and the conflation of ethnicity with culture.

On Friday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Khizr Khan, Pakistani-American and father of a fallen solider, said, “In this division and hate, there is a foreign hand. Our adversaries wish to sow this hate and this division so that we will continue to fight this for many years to come.” https://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/khizr-khan-trump-politically-expedient-for-minimizing-white-nationalism-in-new-zealand-attack-1459232323610 (4:20 into the tape)

Now, Chris Matthews didn’t think to ask Mr. Khan what he meant by a foreign hand. But we can ponder which foreign power would have cause to pursue such a grand strategy. It would have to be a country that, like the white reactionaries, is objectively powerful but considers itself persecuted and outnumbered. It would have to be a country with no sympathy for “cosmopolitan” Western values, instead oscillating between radical autocracy and radical Marxism (and back). It would have to be a country that sees its foreign policy goals as threatened by the Western alliance and the global order it organized, and therefore seeks to undermine that system wherever possible. To that end, it not only would sponsor political parties abroad that seek to end association with the European Union, it would fund gun-rights lobbies, not because they actually care about gun rights in their own country, but because they see that as a wedge issue with high potential to cause division and violence.

Which country would that be? As Nathan Lane would say, “Do the math.”

And with that – since this is St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a song to get your Irish up.

“You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now. “

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”

-Ann Coulter

I will get to Viceroy Trump’s national “emergency” in a bit. But I had been thinking of a prior recent event, which caused me to think of a more distant event, which ties into the current situation.

In actual news south of the border, the socialist nation of Venezuela is in the grip of mass starvation because of its economic and political actions, and thus the US and other nations have not only recognized Juan Guaido, the challenger in the last elections, as the legitimate President over current leader Nicolas Maduro, they are sending in convoys of food and humanitarian aid through US ally Colombia. Maduro, seeing Colombian action as a means of undermining his regime, has militarized the border to stop aid from getting through.

And this reminded me of something else, actually. A time long ago. Live Aid.

The actual concert has been given more attention recently because of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, but it was the culmination of Bob Geldof’s relief efforts for Ethiopian famine relief, starting in 1984, with the production of the all-star single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The single was specifically recorded so that all sales would go to famine relief. I remember David Bowie getting on TV to tell people to go out and buy the record, saying “you can throw it away afterward if you want to.” And that’s exactly what I did. I went to the record store, bought the disc (you did that in those days) and then immediately threw it in the trash can outside. It was a shit record. But still better than “We Are The World.”

But anyway. The Live Aid broadcast had all sorts of telethon-like fundraisers in the middle of the concert performances in which Geldof and others pointed out that with the resources available in developed countries it was indeed possible to “feed the world.” It was the most utopian I’ve ever felt about life. There did indeed seem to be a practical means of solving the world’s problems, if we could just get enough volunteers together to do the right thing. The Live Aid project has been estimated at raising 150 million British pounds for famine relief. The problem is what happened afterward.

Much of the relief shipments ended up waiting on the docks in Africa, some of it eventually being used by Ethiopia’s Marxist Derg government to buy arms from the Soviet Union, other aid being used to fund leftist rebels against that government. It later turned out that much of the food shortage was created or exacerbated by Derg government policies, such as the confiscation of food to prioritize urban populations, and the resettlement of people to state farms, which actually reduced food production as people were moved from productive areas. So while the famine relief did do some good, it was used by a monstrous government in order to preserve itself and draw out people’s suffering.

Reading about this at the time is in retrospect one of the things that confirmed my position as an anti-communist and anti-socialist, at least as much as any theories by Ayn Rand. And overall, it’s a good example of why I point to government as a primary source of blame if things go wrong in the world, because even when private actors and public collectives wish to do good, the local government can either make things more organized or make things a whole lot worse.

You might ask, what does any of this have to do with Trump’s declaration of a national emergency? The February 15 announcement in itself was just more of a racist-uncle-on-Thanksgiving-telling-shaggy-dog stories than usual. And I’d seen several people on social media saying that this country is already under the effects of various emergencies, and it hasn’t led to the death of the Republic yet. My response to those people is that the fact that this latest “emergency” is in many ways no big deal is exactly the problem. The government under the Constitution was kept limited for a reason. A free people should not have to think about their government all that much. It’s sort of like your health: you only notice it when something’s wrong. If the government can do anything – like put you in a secret prison just because you’re a Jew – you have to care more about who runs it. This applies even if you think the government is supposed to be an active force for good, because you have to use politics to make it provide things (like national healthcare) that aren’t specifically enumerated in the Constitution. If we had been more serious about such limits in the past, we would not be reaching a point where we seriously have to ask whether the President can seize Congress’ power of the purse just because he feels like it. But whereas Republicans used to be the main people screaming about Democratic control of the process, now they’re going along with Trump’s power grab – apparently as a consolation prize to Trump nationalists who otherwise would have forced a second government shutdown.

There’s a theory I have that applies to the workings of government in general and the Trump Administration and current Republican Party in general. In game terminology, (mostly in role-playing games but also traditional board games) there’s a difference between the “rules as written” and the game as it’s actually played. For instance, in Monopoly, it’s usually assumed that all the miscellaneous fees that get paid due to Chance/Community Chest cards, utility fees, etc., get put into a “kitty” in the middle of the board and whoever lands on the Free Parking space gets whatever’s there. In standard Monopoly, that’s not a rule. Another Monopoly example, when the game is starting and you land on an unowned property, you have the option to simply not buy the property and if you pass that option, your turn just ends. However, in Rules As Written, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Monopoly/Official_Rules if you choose not to buy the property at listed price, it must be auctioned and given to the highest bidder. Most people dispense with this rule because they don’t want to do all that fiddling around. However, if the game were played as written, all the properties on the board would be snapped up more quickly and the game would move to its natural conclusion more quickly. Thus, a house rule that is intended to save time and hassle compared to Rules As Written ends up doing the opposite.

Well, in terms of the US government, the Rules As Written are the US Constitution. And in the Constitution, the three separated and equal branches of government are the judiciary, executive and legislature. However the Founders either disdained or did not consider the fact that party politics are the political default in most representative governments (certainly in the British Parliament). And because of how party politics turned out here, the real three branches of government are the judiciary, the Republicans and the Democrats. And the judiciary is chosen by the dominant party of the other two. And there are various examples of how arranging the government around their “house rules” skews the rules as written. For instance, only the Congress can declare war, but they decided by the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that they didn’t want to follow that rule cause it was too much fiddling around. So we’ve house-ruled the status quo where the president effectively declares war and the Congress rubber-stamps it, and that ends up causing more complication (and death) than the system everyone wants to avoid as being too complicated.

One corollary to this is that in practical terms there are other “branches” that preserve or affect the balance in politics beyond what is enumerated in the Constitution. State governments, for example, have some leeway to act except where specifically mandated by federal law. But there are also private actors who influence politics. Organized labor is another one of these “branches”, and as it has become largely obsolete, that helps to explain a large measure of how the Right was able to consolidate power in the US. (The factor of organized labor in politics is also why one of the first things any Leninist or fascist regime does is to nationalize the unions.)

Another critical factor in this balance is the role of the press. As has often been said, the press is the watchdog of liberty and the enemy of tyrants. But if liberal writer Jim Wright concedes that “the Press is not required to” be responsible, that also means that this lack of responsibility can have effects. I have talked several times about how the sensationalist, nominally liberal mainstream media are largely responsible for Trump’s presidency, largely because they treated him as a more serious candidate than the third-party choices, let alone Republicans who had better resumes, because he himself was a sensationalist on their level. As Les Moonves (formerly of CBS) said of the Trump campaign, “it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” More directly, much of Republican policy, especially Trump’s, is affected by what I call the “grievance media,” the right-wing counterculture of Fox News, talk radio, Ann Coulter and similar types who are not working in government now, usually never were in government, but think that the main problem with the Republican Party, no matter how much it alienates everyone else, is that it’s too compromising and not hardass enough. In fact, this was a prime cause of the last government shutdown; Mitch McConnell had raised a voice vote to pass a 2018 budget bill and a bill was going to be approved by the House without funding for Trump’s wall, but then Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh heard about it and went berserk, telling all their listeners to give the Republicans what for. Thus Trump shut the government down, with support from the House, and McConnell, who suddenly refused to support his own bill.

But this association between right-wing government and right-wing media – perhaps one could call it collusion – took a more sinister turn recently. It’s been known for quite some time that the National Enquirer, America’s biggest “tabloid” paper, has been in the tank for Donald Trump. The Enquirer’s publisher, David Pecker, is a personal friend of Donald Trump, and in 2016, the paper published several articles attacking Hillary Clinton’s moral and physical fitness to be President, while also defending Trump and his family. Since Trump became President, it has been revealed in court (thanks to Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen) that the Enquirer had a “catch and kill” policy of protecting Donald Trump from sex scandals by buying the silence of his former liaisons. Partially due to these incidents, federal prosecutors granted Pecker immunity in exchange for his testimony on pending cases.

In contrast, one of the (many) media people that Trump has decided to hate on is Jeff Bezos, an actual billionaire (as opposed to the TV kind), most famous as the founder of Amazon.com but who also bought the Washington Post in 2013. Since then the property has become profitable for the first time, partially because of an investment in online subscriptions, and largely because in the wake of Trump’s election, it has cast itself as a watchdog on the Trump Administration, with the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Well, Bezos recently announced a divorce from his wife, ahead of revelations from the Enquirer in January of “sleazy text messages and gushing love notes” between Bezos and his mistress. Mr. Trump, as always, felt obliged to comment in a January 13 Tweet: “So sorry to hear that the news of Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better and more responsible hands!” After this, Bezos decided to have his people investigate exactly how his private communications got out. Bezos also had reason to believe the Enquirer was antagonized by the Post’s investigations of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was responsible for the killing of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and is also involved in close business deals with both the Trump Administration and Pecker’s media company, AMI. According to Bezos, once AMI found out he had a private investigator on them, they sent him a communication that they had specific nude photos of him and that they would be released if he did not back off. Bezos responded with an expose’ in medium.com entitled “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker.” (In the Trump Era, the jokes just write themselves.) And in this piece, Bezos makes his case as to how it all adds up, including the “CONFIDENTIAL & NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION” email sent to Bezos’ investigator. He also says at an earlier point how Pecker and AMI had an immunity deal based on their involvement with the Trump campaign – a deal that may now be endangered because part of the terms is the following: “should AMI commit any crimes subsequent to the date of signing of this Agreement, or should the Government determine that AMI or its representatives have knowingly given false, incomplete, or misleading testimony or information, or should AMI otherwise violate any provision of this Agreement, AMI shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of this Office has knowledge, including perjury and obstruction of justice.”

This is apparently a long-established pattern in which the National Enquirer has defended its interests – now including Trump’s interests and allegedly Saudi Arabia’s interests – by blackmailing both celebrities and journalists. As Bezos said in his article: “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? “

Given how anti-labor Amazon can be, and given the image Bezos has developed, it is very easy for the Left to target him. (The most famous example of this was Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a new bill against low-benefit corporations to be called the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act or ‘Stop BEZOS Act‘). And yet, Bezos as owner of the Post is by his own influence preserving a major part of the media against Trumpist pressure, and the attacks on him illustrate how bad that pressure can get, and what could happen to the media if he were not resisting it. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.

It may seem odd for socialists to think of self-centered billionaires as “good guys” or Resistance leaders, and it is not an ideal state of affairs that the private sector has more public spirit and responsibility than the government. But that is where we are right now. Various government and non-government actors have their own motivations and agendas, and (as I hope liberals are finding out now) government is not automatically good because it is government, and private actors are not automatically evil because they’re not government. By the same token, business is not automatically good and government is not automatically evil (as I hope right-wingers are finding out now).

If absolute, unchecked power is a danger with a socialist government (like Venezuela, or 80’s Ethiopia) and also with a right-wing plutocracy like the Trump Administration, then what you see is not so much that a “left” or “right” politics in themselves are destructive, but that any politics becomes destructive once one camp gets control of both the private sector and government. In this regard, the differences between the two sides are indeed based on their ideology and premises even if the results on the extremes are similar. On the leftist extreme of Marxist-Leninism, fusion of capital and state is the entire point, and however much this is stated as a vehicle towards “pure communism” or statelessness, anything that is appropriated as a “public” resource necessarily cannot belong to all in common, but must be administered by a separate group – in short, a government. On the Right, you have fascism, which has been broadly defined (not necessarily by actual Fascists) as a fusion of state and corporate power. It is a subject of hot debate as to what the economic policies of fascist countries even were, since they were expedient and not terribly consistent. But they are clearly in contrast to Leninism in that private property and wealth are allowed to great degree, even if everything is ultimately controlled by the State. A more salient element of fascism is that in comparison to Marxism it preserves social inequities and actually promotes traditional human desires for status-based cultures, making a virtue out of sexism, racism, and the exploitation of resources, even as fascists sought to justify such on nationalist-collectivist rather than “selfish” terms.

However, leftists in this country have traditionally not seen much danger in Big Government or the threat that Big Government could be turned toward fascist ends (even as they seek to deconstruct the whole American project as inherently unjust). This is partially based on the assumption that they would always be politically dominant, and partially because they see the growth of government as necessary to their social goals. Given their antipathy to capital, between the two they would prefer a government that was ascendant over the private sector, possibly to the extent of making it irrelevant. For their part, American right-wingers only fear Big Government when they aren’t in charge of it, and since they have not only spent long years out of the political mainstream but are falling prey to a persecution complex that is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, the idea that they may have to stand in opposition to democracy is an idea that many on the Right will seriously entertain. They are hardly afraid of collectivism as long as it, like fascism, preserves the trappings of property and capitalism, since most “capitalists” these days would rather have the rewards of capitalism without the risks. It stands to reason that the only way such rewards and protections can be guaranteed is to already be of the elite. That too, is hardly a barrier and is in many ways a selling point, since fascism and its imitators deliberately or otherwise seek to preserve existing power structures. The risk that an all-powerful government might end up turning against you, despite your own power and privilege, is real, but these days Republican elites are finding a way around that; rather than merely financially propping up the government in exchange for favoritism or contracts, they can simply buy into the existing Administration.

What this comes down to is that both political camps can see the same problem – the concentration of power and the fusion of capital and state – but neither Left nor Right wants to do anything about it because each sees the fusion of capital and state power as a great thing when THEIR side is in charge. The other reason that they don’t do anything about this threat is that this would require some ability to cooperate between tribes, which the drive to power makes impossible. And so each side becomes steadily more miserable and paranoid about the other, each convinced that Apocalypse will result if the Enemy gets control. And in the process, each creates more evidence for the other’s fears. And neither considers that the real reason that neither can get all they want is not just that the American government is a institution for sharing power, but that most Americans do not share their ideological commitments and many think that the two ruling parties are just organized clods and thugs.

“God said, take what you want, and pay for it.” -A Spanish proverb, supposedly

What is remarkable about the obsessive media coverage of Howard Schultz (president emeritus of Starbucks Corporation) announcing his desire to run for president is not the fact that he made the announcement (since everyone in the Democratic Party is running for president) but that the pro-gay, pro-choice billionaire is NOT running as a Democrat. Here’s just three (out of maybe thousands) of media reactions: “Howard Schultz May Be Even More Disingenuous Than Donald Trump” “Howard Schultz Doesn’t Understand American History” and – horror of horrors – when pressed, he can’t say how much a box of Cheerios costs.

If half the reason for Donald Trump’s support is the sentiment, “he may have problems, but he’s got the right enemies” then this apparent media mass phobia toward Howard Schultz would seem to indicate that rather than support Trump or divide the vote against him, all the redcaps ought to go out in 2020 and elect Schultz president, since he offends at least as many liberals as Trump and unlike Trump hasn’t proven to be a complete fuckup.

Obviously my problem with Schultz isn’t that he’s too liberal for the Republicans but not leftist enough for the Democrats. (Indeed, that seems to be his main selling point, if anyone’s buying.) It’s not that he’s an independent, or even that he allegedly would allow an otherwise vulnerable Trump to win re-election. My problem is that I look at this guy and go… why him?

I have an old-school liberal friend who’s such a partisan Democrat that he told me, “I’d rather vote for an empty pizza box than any Republican.” And I told him, “I agree. Unfortunately, Democrats didn’t nominate an empty pizza box in 2016, they nominated Hillary Clinton.” I later said that this is why I ended up voting for Gary Johnson, because he was the closest thing we had to an empty pizza box.

I look at Howard Schultz and I don’t even see an empty pizza box.

I didn’t even know that Howard Schultz was the name of the guy who turned the old Starbucks Seattle coffee shop into a megacorporation, because he, like Starbucks, has no bearing on my life.

Whatever you think of Gary Johnson now, he did have a resume as an elected official and was generally considered to be a good governor of New Mexico, back when Republicans actually cared about good government. And on that score, how am I supposed to believe that Schultz is a “fiscal conservative” when his company charges more for coffee than Ben & Jerry’s does for ice cream?

That’s the real problem with the anti-Schultz hysteria. If somebody like me who seems to be his target audience looks at Howard Schultz and goes, “neh,” then how is he supposed to get enough votes to “spoil” things for the “right” (Democratic) candidate?

This fear and loathing on the part of the commercial intelligentsia has little to do with whether Howard Schultz has any merit as a presidential candidate and everything to do with liberal fear that they’ll lose a sure thing yet again. “Besides, he’d never win.” So why then is a candidate who can’t get enough votes to win guaranteed to pull enough votes to make sure the “right” person doesn’t win? It’s like saying, “Nobody drives in New York, there’s too much traffic.”

Believe it or not, libs, there is nothing in the Constitution that says, “Thou shalt only vote for Democrats or Republicans” nor even a subclause saying “and if you do vote Republican, you’re just a racist meanie who wants to force women to give birth so that the Koch Brothers can eat their babies.” Both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein ran for president before 2016. Your candidate lost in 2016 for the same reason that Gore lost in 2000 and Kerry lost in 2004: Because they sucked. You want to know how you can win presidential elections, Democrats?
NOMINATE A CANDIDATE WHO DOESN’T SUCK.

It’s not that hard. I mean, you did it only ten years ago.

One point of the criticism that does make sense is that there really isn’t that much constituency for people who care much about deficits (in either major party), nor is there a pivotal constituency for people who are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” It used to be that such people – like myself – could at least pretend that they had representation in the Republican Party, but the party in practice never honored that classical liberalism. And since Trump it’s become very clear that the Republicans are animated by the opposite spirit: socially conservative and fiscally statist. Which is why another Slate article suggesting that Schultz, the anti-tax liberal, ought to run as a Republican is either clueless or straight-up disingenuous. Ben Mathis-Lilley, referring to Nate Silver’s tweets for FiveThirtyEight, says that Schultz ought to appeal to the fiscally conservative voter who won’t vote for Trump but thinks Democrats have gone too far left. I think this was written before Schultz went on The View and immediately alienated Meghan McCain by saying he was pro-abortion rights. That right there is why Howard Schultz can’t run as a Republican even if he wanted to, because there are two things Republicans will never forgive: being pro-choice and not willing to lie your ass off about how anti-choice you are even if everyone knows you spent half your time banging New York models for at least 30 years and may have had to pay for abortions as a result. Not that this description applies to any Republican, I’m just speaking hypothetically.

But even that just gets to the real point, which is the erroneous idea that the Republican Party gives a rat’s tail more for fiscal conservatism than it does for social libertarianism. Mathis concludes: “By running as a Republican, Schultz would almost certainly not defeat Trump. But by giving GOP voters a chance to vote for a fiscal conservative who isn’t a raving conspiracy idiot, Schultz would be selflessly providing a model for a sane Republican Party that is more like the conservative parties elsewhere in the developed world, and he’d be directly challenging the guy who is most personally responsible for the “toxicity” he says he deplores in national politics. ” But the reason the formerly grand old party is what it is now is that they were raving conspiracy idiots before Trump showed up. They LIKE being raving conspiracy idiots. Being pro-market and socially tolerant would be more like the conservative parties in the rest of the world, but that only demonstrates that that is not what Republicans want, any more than Democrats want a billionaire who is socially tolerant but anti-tax and pro-business. But yet to Mathis-Lilley, it’s okay if Schultz tilts at the other team’s windmill, just not at his. He doesn’t consider that after years of dealing with windsock Republicans In Name Only, most Republican voters have gotten smart enough to see through this presentation. (They’re just not smart enough to look for a better alternative than Trump.)

This does raise the question of whether there even is a political constituency for people like us, where it’s going to go, or even what it is. Libertarianism? The New Whigs? What? Because if the last few years have proven that we have no place in the Republican Party, we are if anything more hated by the “tolerant liberal” Democrats.

In Reason, Nick Gillespie addressed the question of why Howard Schultz couldn’t just run as a Democrat: “(In) other interviews, Schultz is perfectly clear on why, if he runs, he will do so as a “centrist independent.” He openly disagrees with a lot of ideas that dominate Democratic Party discourse and he doesn’t want to be forced into accepting those policies… In his various interviews over the past week or two, he never misses an opportunity to talk about how a $21 trillion debt is the single biggest problem we need to reckon with. He’s right to say it not only ties the hands of government (and the ligatures get tighter as interest rates rise) but also that it inhibits broad-based economic growth, the best way to increase living standards. He also refused to be penitent about being rich last night, at one point saying he helped to create a great company and wasn’t going to apologize for his or anyone else’s success. He called the class-warfare rhetoric used by so many Democrats “so un-American”! In other words, he doesn’t fit very well in today’s Democratic Party.” “There’s almost no way he can actually win, especially if he runs as an independent, but since when should getting elected be the main goal of politics?”

This is actually close to the sentiment from the other side of the argument. Referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ recent proposal to bring back the 70% marginal tax rate,

Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Atlantic: “Most Americans—myself included—probably don’t have a well-thought-out position on whether a 70 percent marginal tax rate is a good idea. But it probably doesn’t matter whether it is, or whether it would “work.” To argue that “workability” is secondary might sound odd to many Democrats, particularly party leaders and experts who have long prided themselves on being a party of pragmatic problem-solvers. This, though, could be the most important contribution so far of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the new crop of progressive politicians—the realization that the technical merits of a particular policy aren’t the most relevant consideration. For these new Democrats, the purpose of politics (and elections) is quite different.”

He continues: “Few people actually vote based on policy. As I recently argued in American Affairs, even the better educated don’t primarily vote based on policy. In fact, higher levels of education can increase polarization. (In other contexts, such as the Middle East, the advent of universal education and higher college attendance fueled ideological divides.) … Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives appear to understand instinctually what (a) growing body of research on voter preferences suggests. And its implications are potentially far-reaching. Once you accept that voters are rationally irrational, you can’t help but change how you understand political competition. Incidentally, this is one reason that right-wing populists across Europe (and India and the Philippines and many other places) have been surprisingly—or unsurprisingly—successful: They seem to have relatively little interest in what works.”

I am not quite so sure that disregard for what works is acceptable. More times than I can count, I have gone over how Republicans made repealing the Affordable Care Act the center of their domestic policy, and then once they actually had a Republican president to do so, they didn’t have anything to replace it with. And that lack of a plan wasn’t just not constructive, it was actually destructive – whether you’re a liberal who wants healthcare as part of public policy or a right-winger who thinks we could have done better than the ACA. Where I will agree with Hamid is where he says that setting the terms of debate – or shifting the Overton Window, as he later discusses – is ultimately just as important as hammering out the policy itself.

However libertarian I am, I’m not fanatically opposed to some level of public support, especially (as with healthcare) the alternative would be even more costly in the long run. But if we actually want a valid democracy, decisions have to be made by an informed electorate. My opinion is that if you want all kinds of stuff to be covered by the government, you had better be prepared to pay for it. And by “you”, I mean YOU. If you’ve read history (or at least Wikipedia) you’ll know that the whole premise of the 16^th Amendment (legalizing a progressive income tax) was to move away from tariffs as a means of financing the government, since they disproportionately affect the poor. A gross income tax was presented as applying only to the upper percentile of income. When first enacted in 1913, the base rate for most people was 1 percent and the top rate was 7 percent. That didn’t last long. Currently, Elizabeth Warren is proposing a wealth tax that would only affect the “tippy top 0.1 percent”. Odds are, that wouldn’t last long, either. And that’s why right-wingers are always asking how much government we’re supposed to have, because desire is infinite and funding is limited. Even if we do soak the rich and reverse the Trump-Ryan tax cuts (which we probably need to do anyway), it won’t cover all the new stuff “progressives” want to do. And while Republicans have successfully played this game of telling Americans that they can have all the Big Government they want without paying for it, the reason they can get away with their anti-tax stance is that it’s just a variant of the Democrats’ stance: “Someone else will pay for it, not you.”

In this regard, Howard Schultz is just like the rest of us in that he doesn’t want to pay more in taxes than he absolutely has to. But unlike the rest of us, he has the money and influence to affect public policy. And I’m sure that counts for a lot of leftist resentment. But if the unpopularity of redistributionist policy is grossly overstated, that does not make it universally popular, if the need for such policy needs to be seriously debated, that debate will not necessarily make the policy more popular, and if it is implemented, it won’t necessarily work, or be a political payoff for Democrats.

Because even the moderate liberal Affordable Care Act was compromised and badly implemented, such that it became a political liability to Democrats who lost record numbers of Congressional seats under Obama, also losing the Senate in 2010, with results that are still being felt now. The only reason the ACA survived is because it was clear that Republicans had no clue, or desire, to come up with anything better.

The problem is that Democrats can’t just win every policy argument by default, or by going “But Republicans are worse.” After all, they tried that in 2016, and that’s how we got Trump.

And that, I suspect, is the real reason that the Left is panicking.

I do not like Nancy Pelosi. I do not obsessively HATE her like Dennis Miller, but I am generally not impressed. I’m sure that someone who’s been an elected official for as long as she has must have some virtues and skills that are not readily apparent, but as a public figure, Pelosi is almost as dull as Chuck Schumer and that much more gaffe-prone than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unlike AOC, Pelosi isn’t so media-savvy and quick on the uptake that she will recognize and correct her gaffes as quickly as possible.

So I have to give Pelosi credit for her polite disinvitation of Viceroy Trump to the State of the Union speech scheduled for January 29, “given the security concerns” as long as the government is shut down and Secret Service people are not paid. This hits Trump where he lives. Not only is he deprived of (yet another) opportunity to make his case for the shutdown on TV, he is deprived of a traditional aspect of our increasingly imperial presidency. Now Trump won’t get to penguin-waddle up the aisle, get up to the speaker’s podium, and show all the TV cameras how big his hands are. Pelosi did give Trump the traditional option of presenting the speech in writing, which is an even bigger insult. Not that Trump, or any other president, is going to write his entire State of the Union speech, but now Stephen Miller is going to have to do the hard work of searching Trump’s tweets to come up with enough typos and unneeded capitalizations to make it look authentic.

Some Republicans, like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (who seems to equate ‘libertarianism’ with ‘kissing Trump’s ass’) have suggested that Senate leader Mitch McConnell offer his chamber of Congress for the SOTU speech, but apparently he hasn’t considered that this would simply be inviting a mass Democratic boycott of the event, which Pelosi’s action effectively is.

Instead, Trump decided – about 24 hours after Nancy’s maneuver – to be clever and cite his own security concerns as a pretext for cancelling the military escort for the trip that Pelosi and other Representatives were scheduled to make to an Afghanistan war zone, apparently timing the decision after the Congressmen had already gotten on a bus to the airport. No doubt that impressed many of those moderate Democrats that Trump is trying to get on his side. It didn’t even seem to impress some of Trump’s usual defenders, like Senator Lindsay Graham (R.-S.C.) who opposed Pelosi’s manuever but said, “One sophomoric response does not deserve another”. And the fact that Trump was not terribly serious in his opposition to the use of military escort during a shutdown was confirmed when Melania Trump took a military flight to Trump Mar-a-Lago in Florida, after King Donnie’s royal proclamation.

Seriously, how DID this man sire five kids with such a teeny weenie?

Perhaps realizing that all of his posturing is getting him less than nothing in the polls, Trump spent some time between Wednesday and Friday conferring with Republicans and confidants including Jared Kushner (but not Democrats), Trump declared on Friday that there would be a “major announcement” about border security and the budget standoff on Saturday afternoon. This turned out to be a plan with several points: while still demanding $5.7 billion for a wall, Trump is offering a three-year extension of status for DACA recipients and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders with $800 million more to address humanitarian issues at the border (which Trump’s policies had exacerbated). The problem being that these concessions are of a temporary nature while the wall is intended to be permanent. More importantly, at this stage, Democrats have no reason to trust Trump (but then, neither would Republicans, if they weren’t so desperate). Specifically, when Pelosi and Schumer tried to shut down the government to protect DACA “dreamers”, and were at a disadvantage because they didn’t have a majority in either house of Congress, they’d offered Trump his wall with a $25 billion budget in exchange for offering Dreamers a path to citizenship. Trump, apparently at the last minute, went back on the deal. So now Trump is escalating his demands with less leverage to work with (because now Pelosi has a majority). So normally one would give the president some credit for moving toward common ground, but you can never assume good faith with Trump. And now, not only do the Democrats know this, they are in position to act on that knowledge. So the major announcement comes down to a big fat nothing. Just like Trump.

It’s amazing that our nominal president did even this much to negotiate, but it’s still of a piece with his generally lazy, grudging and half-assed approach to governance. It probably explains why he made his announcement on a Saturday, when there weren’t going to be that many national media folks covering it. Of course the other danger of staging your event on a non-news day is that not only are people going to be focused on other things, the media may end up focusing on something even more marginal.

In my case, when I woke up late on Saturday and checked social media, the buzz wasn’t about Trump’s pseudo-concession. Rather, most news articles were going on about another incident in Washington.

Friday afternoon, some teenagers (allegedly) from a Catholic school in Kentucky were attending a March for Life rally (which hadn’t gotten that much attention in the media) and confronted a group of tribal native protestors of the Indigenous Peoples March (which got even less media attention). Everyone was focused on a particular moment when social activist and Omaha elder Nathan Phillips walked up to the kids and got in a face-off with this one Andy Samberg lookalike. By Saturday it was the only thing anyone could talk about, including Trump’s “deal.”

Now, there are a lot of the usual suspects on conservative websites and YouTube claiming to present the “real” story, such as the fact that the kids (who were all wearing MAGA hats, and not that much Christian or pro-life gear) were being provoked by some left-wing extremists called the Black Hebrews. At one point this group noticed a black student with the “pro-life” group and taunted him saying “when you get old enough, they gonna steal your organs” and then telling him, “get out, nigga.” Phillips himself told reporters that his group noticed the confrontation, although blaming the mostly white kids for it, saying: “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals.” At that point Phillips and his group walked up to the crowd and began chanting. At which point one of the Indians got in an animated but civil discussion with one of the whites there, telling him, “this is not your land.” Videos taken by the black protestors tend to confirm the position that Phillips intervened on their behalf, with one guy saying “he came to the rescue.” During the event some of the kids were jumping up and down in imitation of the Indian chant, which one YouTube apologist captioned as “kids clearly having fun & making light of a tense situation”.

And while other apologists bought into the narrative that the media were editing the presentation to make conservative Christians look bad, it again raises the point why these kids were almost all wearing “Make America Great Again” or “Trump 2020” hats instead of carrying Christian or pro-life signs. And if Rod Dreher thinks that Nathan Phillips “seeks out these opportunities for confrontation, and then (goes) to the media with them,” well again, this was a lot more publicity than either the Indigenous march or the March for Life had gotten up to this point, and the result reflected far more badly on the latter.

So that’s the other reason that Trump’s gesture of conciliation failed. Not only did it not attract enough attention with the limited emphasis he gave it, Trump’s fan club gave the media a more vivid example of what the movement is really about.

Ironically, this incident just proves that we really do need a strong immigration policy for this country. After all, the Omaha didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

Something to consider as this country heads toward Martin Luther King Day, the only federal holiday that celebrates an individual who was not a member of the military, not an elected politician, and used his First Amendment rights to protest for change within the system.

If for no other reason, that makes King a better example for libertarians than Rand Paul.

As of Saturday morning, we have officially reached the point where the current government shutdown is the longest in American history, all for a manufactured crisis because Edward Babyhands wanted to have something tall and hard in his life for once.

I refer again to the tweetstorm by writer Matthew Chapman: https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1002502139367837702

“The one thing that you need to understand about Trump is that he is, at his core, a con man with no empathy. Therefore, he assumes that all other people are also con men with no empathy, and every exchange of goods and services that exists in the world is, on some level, a con. Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you’re not ripping someone off, you’re getting ripped off. … This is why Trump will never, ever, be able to negotiate with the rest of the world. He doesn’t believe in mutual benefit. The second anyone tells him ‘this is your end of the deal’ he’ll rip it up. He believes only one party can have an end of the deal, and it shouldn’t be him.”

Chapman said this in June 2018. He went on to say:

“This explains his behavior over DACA, spiking two bipartisan deals even though they were what he asked for. He assumed if Democrats were willing to talk, his deal wasn’t ripping them off, ergo it would rip him off. That implies if Democrats win Congress, we are going to enter an all-out legislative standstill like we’ve never before seen. Our system is entirely reliant on compromise and compromise isn’t compatible with Trump’s beliefs. We will struggle to pass even basic reauthorizations.”

Where is the lie, Trumpniks?

This is of course not the first time that one party (usually it’s the Republicans) has refused to approve a budget and forced a shutdown hoping to get their way. And when this happens, the shutdown is really more rhetorical than actual. In this case, about a quarter of the government and 800,000 workers are either furloughed outright or expected to work without pay.

Because various agencies (including Defense and Social Security) were already pre-funded by December, Congress, acting without foresight, has thus decided that not only are there non-essential functions that are no longer done and do not get paid, there are essential functions that do get paid, and then there are essential functions that do NOT get paid. Got it?

This makes sense, really. If you actually shut down the government, its truly essential functions would no longer be covered, and basic stuff like border security – which remember, is what this whole squabble is supposed to be about – would be suspended. So we’re still doing that stuff, right? Wrong.

Yet, rather than focusing on how this national security “emergency” is threatening national security in the here and now, the mainstream media is focusing on the hardship to employees of the TSA, the IRS and even the Border Patrol, because they’re among the “essential” agencies who are still not budgeted or getting paid. Since the entire raison d’etre of the TSA is security theater, the fact that TSA agents are having their paychecks held hostage to the newer, bigger and louder iteration of security theater is kinda ironic. If the Resistance is hoping to pull the tear ducts of the average American by asking them to sympathize with the average TSA employee or IRS agent… well, they’d better get used to six more years of this.

Because that’s what the Very Stable Genius said could happen when he hoped that this could go on for “months, even years.” And I kinda hope it does too. Well, not two whole years. Just 22 months. So that on November 2020, Trump can go to the cameras and ask the general electorate if they think his shutdown is still worth it. I think he will be truly amazed by the response.

What’s essential? Apparently the salaries of Congress. And the president who started this whole mess in the first place. So the people who are actually serving the public are not being paid while they do so, meanwhile the people who could stop this at any time but refuse to vote for a budget are being paid for not doing their jobs.

If y’all wonder why libertarians hate government, here you are.

The “solution” that Trump and his sycophants are waving around is the idea of using presidential powers to declare a national emergency and appropriating funds from elsewhere, such as the money that is supposed to go to disaster relief in California and Puerto Rico. As even Fox & Friends (the closest thing to a panel of trusted advisors that the president has) said, making a national emergency out of a partisan demand would set the stage for the next Democratic president to declare (say) climate change a national emergency and bypass opposition in Congress to reorder the government to his liking. Thereby giving the “liberal” Big Government movement more precedent and support than it could have achieved by its own efforts. Nevertheless, even though Trump seems to have backed off this idea for now, there are supposed to be just as many Republicans who would like Trump to do this, because by making the standoff a matter of executive action, Congress won’t have to deal with it anymore, the government can get back in session, and in the (not guaranteed) event that the courts strike the initiative down, the Republicans can go to their base and say “at least we tried.”

So we’re supposed to give the president emergency power (that he says he already has) because of an “emergency” that was not pressing enough to do something about through constitutional means when the Republicans held all branches and the opportunity existed. What this really amounts to is a desire by the executive to bypass the legislative process and by the Republican contingent of the legislature to dodge responsibility for its role in the government. If they allow this to occur, then they are asserting that the standard for what constitutes a “national emergency” is whatever gets a bug up the current president’s ass.

The party of small government, ladies and gentlemen. As Rachel Maddow would put it, a government just small enough to fit in your uterus. In this case, it’s so small it may not even reach the uterus.

As I’ve stated, while many of us want to believe in natural rights, as a practical matter, “rights” are only those things we can convince the government to support and enforce. In the same regard, government itself is not an a priori thing that exists outside politics. In part, this is just a matter of ontology. People on the Right are (broadly) individualists rather than collectivists because the individual is pre-existing and necessarily existing. The collective does not necessarily exist. Any collective is just an empty set without its constituent individuals. In that regard, government, as a collective, does not pre-exist the people of the nation. If we ceased to exist, the government would not exist. If the government did not exist, we would still continue to exist. We would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, yes, but we WOULD exist.

That being the case, everything government does is not truly “essential”, except in terms of descending priorities. A government needs to be able to collect revenue to do anything else, including enforce laws. To enforce tax collection, it needs to have various levels of law enforcement (for all the laws deemed necessary, including taxation). And to have a territory in which to enforce laws, it needs to be able to enforce borders and standards of citizenship. Even the Right should be able to agree that taxes are necessary on that level, and even the Left should be able to agree that borders and standards are necessary. But to confirm even these minimal standards, there has to be a political consensus. In a republic or representative system, we elect people to serve a party agenda that is stated in advance. But if Republicans elect people for the sake of law enforcement and border security (and Democrats do the same, just not so self-consciously), and they end up thwarting both law enforcement and border security for the sake of one man’s emotional pique, then even the most minarchist right-wing conception of government is rendered non-essential, because fripperies like border security, law enforcement and taxation have been rendered into negotiables.

We have not needed to consider this because up until now it was considered a given that all the things approved by government were always going to be funded (whether the money was there or not). Now that’s no longer the case. Conversely, even during the New Deal, it was not automatically assumed that government would be involved in all endeavors of life. Now most people (other than libertarians) can’t imagine government NOT being involved in all endeavors of life. But now they’ll have to, not necessarily by choice. Now the question is not the hypothetical “how much government do we need” versus “how much government do we want?” Now it’s the practical question, “how are you going to get along without the level of government that we’ve had?”

When even the funding of the IRS is just a matter of priorities, this only makes it clear that the only difference between “essential” and non-essential services is the ability to reach a political consensus. This can be demonstrated by the simple fact that some “essential” services did get funding resolutions in 2018 while others did not. If Social Security had not been funded for next year before Ann Coulter took Donnie to the woodshed, then that Trump would be dancing on that “third rail” hard enough for us to know how much of his scalp is still naturally covered. Liberals might think it is “essential” for government to provide a national health care system, or to have a comprehensive plan to deal with climate change. But not only do we not have either now, we have never had either. And that’s because of the political environment. While the Constitution puts a limit on what government is allowed to do, most of what it does reflects the political consensus more than the limits of the law.

So while a libertarian might question how much of this government is actually necessary, the fact of the matter is that we have as much government as we do because a lot of people did consider it necessary, and a lot of voters elected politicians to create a certain level of government. The Republican sellout to the Trumpnik cult of personality has short-circuited that connection between public demand and the political system. And since even libertarians don’t want to live on the level of wolves and cavemen (most of us, anyway) we need to find some way around that.

There are points for debate that we need to have now, not just in terms of the current shutdown but in future cases where the president isn’t acting like the paid agent of a foreign power yet where politicians are on a pre-Trump standard of discourse and are still not able to reconcile. One solution to the high likelihood of a budget standoff shutting down the government would be to simply pass a law saying that where a new budget cannot be passed, the government continues on with the previous budget or continuing budget agreement by default.

An automatic resolution would at least serve budget hawks in that they could not hold the government hostage to their budget but could also make sure that the government did not grow any more. They might ask, “Wait – wouldn’t this also mean there’s no incentive to reduce the size of government?” Yes. But that would force them to acknowledge that the Republican Party has never cared about this. However much they may hack at the base of tax revenue and pretend that even steeper hacks to the safety net will make up the difference, the overall size of government never goes down. And that’s partially because for all the cuts they make to infrastructure, regulations and social services, Republicans throw in a few more wasteful, intrusive pet projects like the TSA and the YFW (Your Fucking Wall). Like all good redistributionists, they are less about taking money for the common good (if that exists) and more about shunting it to preserve their political machine and benefit their favored demographics, in this case the people who pay for their campaigns. The problem, as the budget standoff will soon make clear, is that however much money Republicans get from the donor class, their actual votes are outnumbered by the number of voters living paycheck to paycheck, which is that much harder when the government wants to not issue paychecks because the day of the week has a Y in it.

One of the reasons that intelligent Republicans continue to goosestep in line is that, however apostate Trump is with regard to the free market, he still ends up giving the donor class what they want: tax cuts for the upper percentile (at the expense of everyone else) and cuts to regulations on business. That’s much more Paul Ryan’s vision than Trump’s, but Ryan needed a Republican president to get what he wanted. Thing is, though, this is not out of line for right-wing economic philosophy, which holds that a hands-off approach to business is better than a high-tax approach that might pay for a comprehensive safety net but could also depress the economy and thus the revenues that are needed to pay for that safety net. Various liberals like Paul Krugman attack this policy because of its effects on the deficit and government’s ability to pay for existing projects. Conservatives claim that the low-tax policy will pay for itself because the resulting economic growth will be just that high. Well, Krugman is right at least in the respect that the US budget deficit grew 17% in 2018. That is largely because of the change in tax policy. In 2017, just after Trump took office, corporate taxes paid for 9 percent of government revenue and individual income taxes paid for 48. Last year (2018) corporations paid 7 percent and individual returns paid for 49 percent. And yet, economic indicators are good. You wouldn’t know from the government website, bea.gov, since “Due to a lapse in Congressional Appropriations for fiscal year 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is closed. This website is not being updated until further notice.” But indicators seem to be improving. Yearly inflation continues to average under 3 percent. In Fall 2018, the unemployment rate reached a historic low of 3.7 percent. US GDP per capita has gone up from $53,399.4 in 2016 to $54,225.45 in 2018, with average wage going up from $22.34 at the beginning of 2018 to $23.05 by December 2018. Economic indicators for 2018 were going that much better, before somebody decided to start a tariff war with the Chinese.

It would seem that, whatever the long-term fiscal costs, the right-wing approach to the economy is working. Why then is it that so many people think this country is on the wrong track?

Perhaps because the party which claims to have the trademark on “small government” is currently run by a squalling man-baby and wannabe authoritarian whose only concept of public service is that the public serves him while he loots the Treasury, assisted by an entire Cabinet of private sector rent-seekers with similar attitudes.

Likewise, if people are discovering that they don’t actually need all the government that they’re paying for, that doesn’t mean they have to like the way that knowledge came about.

It’s time for another old-school fisking.

Today it’s this week’s column in The Daily Caller by Ann Coulter. As you may recall, half of the reason we have this partial government shutdown over “border security” is because Coulter browbeat Viceroy Trump when it looked like he was going to take Mitch McConnell’s escape route and sign the Senate bill that McConnell set up without funding for Trump’s wall.

So now, we have the shutdown, and this is Coulter’s opinion of Mr. Trump’s political strategy so far:

“The media are trying to convince Trump that if he abandons the wall, he’ll be a statesman, so that as soon as he folds, they can start making fun of him as an untrustworthy liar. “
Well, here’s the first error right here. Not that the media would portray Trump as an untrustworthy liar, but that they never had before. Because they were calling him an untrustworthy liar in 2015 and 2016, they have been calling him an untrustworthy liar all through his presidency and they will continue to do so. You wanna know WHY? CAUSE HE’S AN UNTRUSTWORTHY LIAR.

Glad that you’re starting to figure this out, Ann. And while we’re at it, Mexico will never pay for the wall, there is no Easter Bunny, and those guys with Mumford are not his Sons.

“Everyone knows that we can never have a secure border without an impermeable barrier — something like a wall— across all of it.”
Seriously, review your history. The Wall didn’t work for East Germany. And to the extent that border control did work for totalitarian socialist countries – and by the way, how are they worth emulating all of a sudden? – the Warsaw Pact border in Western Europe was a lot less territory to reinforce and defend, and most of the much longer borders of the Soviet Union proper were either at geographically inaccessible points or were adjacent to other totalitarian states that were no improvement.

“The Democrats know it, the voters know it, and the millions of illegals hurtling toward our border like cannonballs know it. “

This is an example of engaging prose that makes absolutely no sense when you think about it.

“The Democrats’ latest idea is to call a wall “immoral, ineffective and expensive. If they think a wall is “immoral,” then they’re admitting it’s effective. “

Derp.

For one thing, it does not logically follow that a thing that is immoral is necessarily effective. The conclusion here being that a thing that is effective must be immoral, and the immorality of a thing is proof of its effectiveness. Which is par for the course with Ann Coulter. But for another thing, isn’t the usual conservative critique of government action that it’s (often) immoral, ineffective and expensive?

As a libertarian, I agree with conservatives that government is often immoral and ineffective. The problem with conservatism in action is that government is made more immoral and ineffective because of conservatives, and in the case of the Trump Administration, that is undeniably ON PURPOSE.
For example: This article in the Washington Post details how one direct result of the shutdown is that the border security work that WAS going on hitherto is now on hold:

“The paralysis in bank accounts extends to overburdened U.S. immigration courts. New filings are piling up on dockets already backlogged by nearly 1 million cases, but many of the judges and clerks who process them have been sent home.:
“And when U.S. companies and employers want to check the immigration status of potential hires, they are greeted by a red banner across the top of the government’s E-Verify website. Those services are “currently unavailable due to a lapse in government appropriations,” it says.”

Why? Because border control and immigration processing are not considered essential government services.

You can’t make this up. Trumpniks really would saw off their own nads with a butter knife if they thought it would own the libs, wouldn’t they?

“To keep the third-world masses flowing across our un-walled border, the media are demanding that Trump agree to nonspecific “border security.” It’s like ordering a Starbucks and instead of getting a coffee, you’re told to have more “pep.” Now move along. Here’s your change. “

There are specific measures for border security already. They may be inadequate by conservative standards, but they do exist. They can indeed be improved. What are those measures? The ones I mentioned in the story above. The very measures, like E-Verify, that are currently suspended even as people can slip through cracks in the Border Patrol, because YOU, Ann, pussywhipped your Dear Leader into this dickwaving contest.

Now move along, Ann. Here’s your change.

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=yset_ff_syc_oracle&p=tyrion+slaps+joffrey#id=3&vid=d894a852d489bab37cfd7b62f3ff2bb2&action=click

“Would liberals accept such airy statements of intent in lieu of clear legal commands for any of the things they care about? (Not to be confused with “our country,” which they do not care about.)

Instead of EPA emissions standards, with specific parts per million of pollutants allowed into lakes and rivers, how about a law promoting “enhanced appreciation of God’s bounty”? Emissions standards are immoral and ineffective!“

See that last part? Now go back to the part where Ann says that Democrats call the wall “immoral, ineffective and expensive.” This is proof that Ann, like her President, is either too stupid to go back and recall her own words before she contradicts herself, or is cynical enough to think that the rubes won’t notice.

You can say that government is generally immoral, ineffective and expensive (the usual right-wing position), you can say that government is often immoral, ineffective and expensive but can be regulated and reformed (the moderate to liberal position), or you can try to claim that the same government that you claim is generally immoral, ineffective and expensive is suddenly moral, effective and fiscally prudent solely on the basis of whether you like the policy and it fits your ideology, which is pure horseshit.

“Democrats’ backup argument is to cite — every four minutes on MSNBC — Trump’s claim that Mexico would pay for the wall.”

They can do that because every four minutes during his speeches, Trump claims that Mexico will pay for the wall.

Once again, Ann: Those guys with Mumford aren’t his sons. Seriously, they’re like the same age, and everything.

“We’re all baffled by Trump not having already taxed remittances to Mexico to pay for the wall (100-percent within the president’s authority under various banking regulations), “

You’re baffled, Ann. The rest of us in the category of “all” are not baffled, we’re disgusted but not surprised.

“but if we’re going to start listing the promises Trump hasn’t kept, this is going to be a long column. “

Understatement.

“In point of fact, however, he never said Mexico would pre-pay. We can tax remittances anytime.”

Well, I’m with you there, Ann. If Trump could do these things, why doesn’t he?
It couldn’t be because your precious little boy never had a plan, has no idea what he’s doing, has no idea how to run a business, let alone a government, and is ultimately just a modern snake-oil salesman with a career pattern of bluffing his way through life, finding out what the suckers want to hear, continuing to lie past the point that everyone knows he’s lying, and hoping that he’ll avoid prosecution because the marks are too ashamed to admit they were conned?

Nah, that can’t be it.

“Nearly every Republican presidential candidate tried to con voters with these meaningless catchphrases about “border security.”

Here are The Des Moines Register’s summaries of some of the candidates’ positions on immigration a few weeks before the 2016 Iowa caucus:

• Jeb Bush: “has called for enhanced border security.”
• Marco Rubio: “proposes … improved security on the border.”
  John Kasich: “believes border security should be strengthened.”
• Chris Christie: “urges … using technology to improve border surveillance …”
• Rand Paul: “would secure the border immediately.”
• Carly Fiorina: “would secure the border, which she says requires only money and manpower.”

They all lost.”

Yes. And the fact that Trump won with “Wall good. Fire bad” is all we need to know about the intellectual character of the “conservative” movement today. Especially in regard to opinion makers like Ann Coulter, who know how to write polysyllabic, grammatically correct paragraphs (unlike Trump) but who still insist on acting like tribal cave dwellers.

“But instead of doing what he said and building a wall, Trump has hired people who don’t even grasp that the point is to make it unattractive to break into our country.

On ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday, Trump’s head of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, announced plans to give illegal alien kids free medical care at the border: “What we’ve done immediately, (Homeland Security) Secretary (Kirstjen) Nielsen and I have directed that we do medical checks of children 17 and under as they come into our process.”

Apparently, our working class is rolling in so much free health care that now, our country is diverting medical resources to treat other countries’ sick kids.”

I’m sorry, you guys keep saying that these people are full of diseases. Now you’re saying you don’t WANT them to have medical screenings?
I suppose we could just shoot the motherfuckers like a horde of invading zombies if we want to make sure they never cross the border at all. Ann, I’m sure that Sarah Sanders would appreciate you making her job more entertaining!

“McAleenan boasted that we — that’s you, taxpayer — will be providing “doctors, physician assistants, paramedics to do an initial intake check so that we know if a child is healthy as they arrive at the border and then make sure they can get medical care if they need it.”

Luckily, this won’t hurt any Americans because the doctors they’re sending to the border are not currently treating any U.S. citizens. Oh, wait! This just in: They will be taken away from sick Americans!”

“[citation needed]” – Wikipedia

“Doctors aren’t like the Petroleum Reserve. We don’t keep them cryogenically frozen, waiting to be unfrozen so they can treat illegals demanding free medical care as the price of hating us. If we rush doctors to the border, they are being rushed away from Americans who need medical care.

How about Democrats compile a list, by name, of the Americans they would like not to see their doctors anymore?”

This is another example of engaging prose that fails to make any sense. Even before thinking about it.

“As a result of this boundless compassion for anyone who is not an American, how many more sick kids are going be dragged by their parents across hundreds of miles of desert just to see an American doctor?…”

There’s a lot of kids within our borders who have to go miles just to see a doctor. And Ann is right, their parents do have to pay out the ass while prisoners, migrants and other freeloaders get care for free. Now, is she saying it’s a BAD thing that the average American can’t afford medical care? What does she propose to do about that?

“And when those kids die, Secretary Nielsen can demand more free medical care for illegals breaking into our country. Instead of having a wall, we’ll have a series of interlocking charity hospitals on the border treating the poor of the world before crossing into a country that didn’t ask for them and doesn’t want them.

“Sorry, America. You lose again. “

Yes. And America will keep on losing as long as the only alternative to liberalism is the “conservative” movement, because if the whip hand of conservatism thinks that Kirstjen Nielsen is too mushy and compassionate, then we’ll never get anything done in this country.

“Ann Coulter is a syndicated columnist and lawyer. “

https://www.theonion.com/law-school-applications-increase-upon-realization-that-1828464779

“Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

-Retired General James Mattis (attributed)

Donald Trump, Viceroy for Russian North America, has lost his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, and he’s also engineered a government shutdown for Christmas that nobody wanted. The two events are quite likely related.

In regard to the first event, it’s interesting that the consensus of the Trump apologist media is incredulity that Trump is being criticized for something that a lot of his own critics wanted all along. One of the columnists in Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative pointed out, “It is telling and not to Mattis’ credit that ending an illegal war in Syria was the one policy disagreement with Trump that Mattis couldn’t stomach.” As even Andrew Sullivan says, “Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies.”

For quite some time, libertarians, leftists and the Buchanan Right have been skeptical of the American establishment continuing to set this country up as the World’s Policeman. Some of us are more skeptical of Trump (and Republicans in general) than others. But then many of Trump’s fans are in the foreign policy establishment, and it’s telling that even many of them are uneasy with the current direction, especially since the closest thing to consistency in the Trump foreign policy was hostility to Iran, and removing American forces (and by extension, the Kurds) as a buffer zone in the region cannot help but assist the Iranians’ strategy of breaking American containment.

Yes, all the Rachel Maddows of the Left are suddenly complaining now that the Evil Empire of the United States is retrenching rather than expanding its commitments. But then, 20 years ago, the same camp was okay with a president being involved in shady real estate deals and cover-ups of consensual affairs that may have been a political liability. At the time, “conservatives” were screaming like it was a second Holocaust. Now their boy is doing the same thing in spades, and they don’t even blink.

But partisanship is to be expected. In this case, it’s not even the point. The reason that Maddow and others who study history are suspicious of everything Trump does, regardless of what it is, really IS because Trump is the one doing things. Because unless you have foolishly pinned all your hopes on the Republican Party and/or Trump, you have seen enough of him to know that nothing he says or does can be taken on good faith. You have to look for an ulterior motive in everything – because there always is.

This is why the resignation letter of Jim Mattis is important. For while it is professionally worded, it targets the areas of disagreement that he had with the president, and why Trump’s positions cannot be taken as the good-faith actions of an executive acting in the national interest. Simply reciting what a Defense Secretary (or President) needs to do merely displays where Trump as a statesman is deficient. Mattis says, “While the US remains the indispensable nation of the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.” As opposed to selling out the Kurds and strengthening Iran at the expense of Iraq and Israel. “It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model-” and if this needs to be pointed out to Trump, he is either not clear about this or is on board with what China and Russia are doing.

“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.” Experience that Trump does not have. In any event, Trump does not treat allies with respect, nor is he clear-eyed about malign actors, because he does not see an interest outside his own ulterior goals, nor does he have the temperament to shape his behavior towards diplomacy.

Donald Trump has only two postures toward the outside world: Either bossy arrogance or bottom-bunk submissive.

General Mattis told Trump, “you have the right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects”. Unfortunately, Floyd R. Turbo died in 2005.

After the fact, reporters revealed that “President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was made hastily, without consulting his national security team or allies, and over strong objections from virtually everyone involved in the fight against the Islamic State group, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.” Specifically on December 14, the White House took a phone call from Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which Erdogan pressured Trump to withdraw our forces from the Kurdish part of the Syrian front, by threatening to attack Kurdish forces while Americans were still camped with them. Despite Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary Mattis being in on the call, despite both men counseling Trump to stand firm, and despite the fact that Trump had previously sided with his advisors, he suddenly decided to agree with Erdogan.

For one thing, we still don’t know exactly what Michael Flynn was doing on behalf of the Turkish government, or why.

The fact that people were still taking Trump on good faith when they should have known better is the reason for the other clusterfuck of the moment. After not only refusing to negotiate with Democratic leaders in Congress but saying to Chuck Schumer’s face that he would take credit for a government shutdown, most of Congress, not wanting to be blamed for yet another shutdown over the holidays, made plans to avoid it. On December 19, the Senate took a voice vote to pass a bill without Trump’s wall. But then the same day the true believers saw which way things were going and they LOST THEIR SHIT. In her feed, conservative attack Whippet Ann Coulter said:

“Trump is doing exactly what I feared he would do in the worst conceivable way. He’s not building the wall, while making ridiculous promises right up until the second before he folds.
“…The basic factory setting on the perception of Trump is: gigantic douchebag. This is a man who manufactured fake Time magazine covers featuring himself with the headline, “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” so that he could put framed copies of it on the walls of his clubs. “His business is convincing people with lowbrow taste to give him their money.

“…It’s not as if a majority of his voters weren’t clear-eyed about what kind of man he is. If anything, Trump’s vulgar narcissism made his vow to build a wall more believable. Respectable politicians had made similar promises over the years — and they always betrayed the voters. Maybe it took a sociopath to ignore elite opinion and keep his word.
“On the basis of his self-interest alone, he must know that if he doesn’t build the wall, he has zero chance of being re-elected and a 100 percent chance of being utterly humiliated.
“But when Trump is alone with Ivanka, they seem to agree that the wall has nothing to do with it. The people just love him for who he is! In a country of 320 million people, I’m sure there are some, but I have yet to meet a person who said, Yeah, I don’t really care about immigration or trade, I just love his personality!
“What else were we going to do? He was the only one talking sense. Unfortunately, that’s all he does: talk. He’s not interested in doing anything that would require the tiniest bit of effort.
“In the end, we’ll probably find out “wall” was Trump’s “safe word” with Stormy Daniels. It’s just something he blurts out whenever he’s in trouble.”

Coulter and Rush Limbaugh may be bigoted and unhinged, but unlike Trump, they’re not actually idiots. They might swallow their qualms to a certain extent, but they’re not going to let Trump piss on their heads and tell them it’s raining. At the same time, they are proof that intelligence is not a barrier to being a Trump cultist, if one is sufficiently bigoted and unhinged. Coulter just proves that such cultists are not limited to the working class in “flyover country” that the coastal media love to look down on. Some of them, like Coulter and Tucker Carlson, ARE in the coastal media. And then you have the Kochs and the Mercers and a whole bunch of people who are supposed to be “experts” in the same way that the Beltway interventionists are “experts” on everything but getting us out of war. When Trump fans say that they care about immigration and trade and don’t care about his personality, that’s BS. Personality is all Trump offers, and that’s all they got. Really, they want to be lied to. But even a couple of them are wondering how much unreality they can take.

So because some of the people who brought the Republican Party to this state not only noticed they were being had, but were willing to say so, we had a situation where House Republicans were literally waiting for Trump’s say so before voting on a budget measure. And that’s how we got to where we are. Not because Trump is pressuring Republicans, but because Republicans, through Trump, are being pressured by their “base.”

However, Trump displays an idiot savant level of skill (emphasis on the idiot) when it comes to grifting, conniving, and self-preservation. In fact, the longer this bullshit goes on, the more he reminds me of Ray Donovan’s dad. And vice versa. Have you noticed, for instance, that even now, Trump has never said anything bad about Michael Flynn, and not much of anything about Paul Manafort, when he’s done everything he could to badmouth Michael Cohen? Have you ever noticed that Trump only compliments another person when he needs something from them? And that as soon as he doesn’t need them anymore, he treats them like one of his ex-wives?

You look at the big picture and you see that there is a sort of cornered-rat strategy to what Trump is doing. Even he could notice that that the odds were not good on a president keeping the House in the midterms, while there was still an outside chance that Democrats could retake the Senate. Where politics is local and people talk about “kitchen table” issues, Democrats win. Where politics is national and conservatives can focus on the “culture war”, they win. Knowing that he would more than likely get investigated by the House next year, prompting demands for impeachment, Trump pulled stunts like militarizing the border in order to mobilize the bigots to come out of statewide Senate races and other races (like DeSantis’ campaign for Florida Governor) where those votes were critical. In so doing, Trump saved the Senate, which is the main reason he can’t just be removed from office. Trump certainly isn’t acting in the best interest of the nation, and he isn’t even acting in the best interest of the Republican Party, otherwise he would have been more help in close House races. Everything Trump does as president is for the same reason he did everything as a civilian: loot the suckers while staying out of jail.

There’s just one problem with all of Trump’s conniving: It is only made necessary by Trump being Trump, and it is critically undermined by the fact that Trump continues to be Trump. For all his unpleasant yowling, Trump is not operating from a position of strength, but of weakness. If Trump hadn’t made promises to Russia and Turkey (possibly after they called in their chips), he wouldn’t have lost Mattis, which might alienate hawk Republicans. And after constantly whining about a wall and having nothing to show for it, Trump proactively demanded a government shutdown, which cooler heads were trying to avoid, but if Trump went along with them he would be alienating the grievance media and red-meat Republicans who are finally starting to admit to themselves that they were conned. But to pacify them, he has to risk alienating the Republican Senate – in whose hands his fate will rest after an impeachment.

Look, imagine you’re Mitch McConnell. And as leader of the Senate Republicans, you’ve been engaged in a mostly successful campaign to stymie Washington Democrats at every turn. Then imagine that Donald Trump – your leader – has given Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer a propaganda coup that they never could have scored through the liberal media. (Except insofar as HE invited them there to film the whole thing live.)

Now imagine, as McConnell, you’ve gotten your Senate to take a voice vote on a bill without a wall, because you realize “the Wall” is just political theater that isn’t going to resolve this country’s real immigration problems as well as e-Verify and other measures that put the pressure on the employers of illegal labor, where it belongs. You’re getting Paul Ryan to count his votes in the House. Now imagine that your precious little boy tosses the building blocks all over the floor because he and his Ann Coulter constituency didn’t get their lolly.

And you wonder why Paul Ryan announced his retirement before the primaries even started.

But that’s what happens when policy is made from the bottom bunk.

Happy Festivus, everybody! Remember, the shutdown isn’t over until Trump is pinned to the floor.

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

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

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

You may ask, what is Rules for Radicals?

Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, here we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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