Occasional Commentary: Recent Episodes
Eric Busch
Caught in an externality trap, Facebook is fighting against the only thing that can save it.
Even as our city weathers this crisis, it is vital to reflect on how it came about, and what we can do in the future to improve the resilience of our water supply.
One wonders what an observer as keen as Ulysses Grant would say about our present moment. Probably not "lol, nothing matters."
Among its other ruinous effects, Graham-Cassidy would turn Medicaid into a slush fund for state governments. We know this because it's happened before.
Donald Trump isn’t the worst president in American history. He’s not even the worst president of this century.
Last year, Donald Trump ran for president. Now I'm a different person.
If nothing else, the last year and a half have been a humbling lesson on how some events, although utterly beyond my control, can alter my day-to-day existence. Can force me to adapt. Can change me, irrespective of my will. I paused today, just to notice the change. I tried to measure it. Which in turn prompted me to think back to the version of myself that existed before all of this happened. That guy was hardly any different than me! But I can’t help but feel that, in some way, he was healthier than I am.
It's not unlike remembering life before the onset of a mild but chronic illness. I can’t be entirely sure, but back then, I think I used to be able to concentrate just a little bit more. Back then, my undivided attention was just a bit less divided. My highs were just a bit higher. Back then, I might have been slightly less categorical and rigid in my thinking.
Although I remain hopeful that the worst outcomes of a Trump presidency will ultimately be avoided, I think I used to be more optimistic and less jaded. I think I was just a bit more willing to grant the benefit of the doubt. I was more confident in my ability to steer any political conversation, no matter how heated, toward common ground. I know I didn’t respond like a pavlovian dog at the mere mention of a stranger’s name.
It’s important and necessary to think about politics. We are an engaged citizenry, these things affect our lives, and it is fitting and proper to remain informed about them. But what used to be a sound habit of mind now feels a lot like the symptom of a disease.
I don't just follow, but actually consume this degrading and exhausting drama. It's hard not to crave, on some level, that heady melange of negative emotions—fear, outrage, sadness, disgust, conceit—that off-gasses from today's politics like a toxic cloud. And even when I want to turn it all off—to get away—I can’t. It’s on every screen, and there are screens everywhere. It's on the minds and lips of my friends and loved ones. Negativity and cynicism are addictive, and they are now the main course in my daily news diet. I'm being conditioned to live in—and perpetuate—my own nightmare. This feels like abuse.
I've already been changed and possibly harmed—simply by witnessing this vile shitshow—in ways I can’t quite enumerate or describe. I imagine that this is happening, in some fashion, to many others as well. I think it's changing, however imperceptibly, the way we understand ourselves in the world, the way we interact with each other, the way we approach our daily lives. I worry that it’s corroding our ability to govern ourselves, which rests upon our ability to generate empathy for one another—even those with whom we vehemently disagree. But then, I am also slightly less empathetic than I used to be.
We're six months into this term. I wonder if my country will even be recognizable in three and a half years. I wonder that about myself.
Permalink
The TSA is the enforcer for the airline industry. Proposed new security regulations will make sure you pay up.
Every second of every day, hundreds of American servicemen and women around the world wait in readiness for a presidential order to launch a nuclear weapon. For most civilians, the idea of global nuclear war seems more remote and fantastical than it has since the beginning of the nuclear age—more like a plot point in a movie than an ever-present possibility. But those who serve on America’s nuclear front lines--its submarines and missile launch facilities—know all too well that nuclear war remains only a phone call and a keyturn away.
Although the day-to-day job tasks of nuclear weapons officers may be technically demanding, their main function is not supposed to require any thought whatsoever. They have been conditioned by years of repetitious training to launch missiles if they receive an authenticated order from the president. In fact, nuclear weapons officers are specifically chosen for duty based on their willingness to deliver death to millions, if so ordered, without question or hesitation. The logic of nuclear conflict makes no accommodations for human psychology or morality. If they receive an authenticated launch order (i.e. an order certain to have come from the President or a surviving head of the nuclear chain of command), it is taken as a given that American nuclear weapons officers will follow it.
It is precisely that certainty, paradoxically, which has permitted us to co-exist with our own terrible devices for three quarters of a century without being destroyed by them. (That, and quite a bit of dumb luck, as Eric Schlosser recounts in his sobering history of American nuclear weapons, Command and Control). The concentration of nuclear authority in the hands of the president, together with the absolute certainty that the president’s launch order will be followed, form two of the major pillars of America's nuclear deterrence doctrine.
The functionality of this arrangement depends upon the careful avoidance of certain questions. But sometimes those questions get asked anyway. In 2011, writer Ron Rosenbaum recounted the story of a former Air Force officer named Harold Hering. Major Hering had proven his dedication and valor, serving five tours in Vietnam and earning a Distinguished Flying Cross. But while training as a nuclear launch officer at Vandenburg AFB in 1973, Hering did something unforgivable in the eyes of the Air Force: he questioned the command process by which it deployed nuclear weapons.
Maj. Hering’s concern was simple: what if the president was mentally unfit to order a nuclear launch? Were there any safeguards to prevent World War III from being started by a deranged president, or a foreign breach of the nuclear chain of command? These were not academic questions at the time. A beleaguered President Nixon — no paragon of mental stability even at his best — was showing visible signs of nervous collapse under the weight of the Watergate scandal. In fact, as the investigation into Watergate approached its endgame, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger quietly ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to check with him personally before passing along any “unusual” military orders coming out of the White House.
But the Air Force was not interested in answering Maj. Hering’s question. They were so keen to avoid it, in fact, that they discharged him for "failure to meet the duty performance required of an officer." According to an Air Force board of inquiry, the legality of a nuclear launch order was not something an executive officer needed to know. “I have to say,” Hering responded in his unsuccessful appeal to the discharge, “I do feel I have a need to know, because I am a human being.” There are still no systemic safeguards in place to prevent an unbalanced president from launching nuclear weapons.
Today marks the 115th day of Donald Trump’s extraordinary presidency. After he won, many hoped that the solemnity of the office would sober him to his grave responsibilities as president. So far though, it is the office itself, not Donald Trump, that has changed, and not for the better. Trump's insatiable neediness, dishonesty and delusion make it impossible for him to act as other presidents have, even though doing so would far better serve his interests. Trump's decision-making seems almost reptilian in its simplicity: that which flatters him or elevates his profile is good, and that which does not is bad. He communicates poorly and recklessly, wasting political capital and undermining his own legitimacy. Far from seeking stability like a normal president might, he radiates chaos and negativity. He is impossible to work with or to trust. He has been diagnosed as a mentally unfit by knowledgeable observers across the political spectrum.
As a candidate, Trump displayed a lack of basic knowledge about America's nuclear command structure. He panned the Iranian nuclear agreement as “disastrous” with no understanding of what it actually did, and pledged to dismantle it on his first day in office. He seemed open to using the threat of nuclear weapons as a negotiating tactic. His military adventures thus far have consisted of a botched raid in Yemen, the pointless and costly shelling of a Syrian airbase with Tomahawk cruise missiles, and the deployment of the most destructive non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal to collapse a few Taliban tunnels in Afghanistan. Trump cannot explain any of these operations in tactical terms, let alone articulate any coherent security strategy underlying them. These flashy but ineffectual actions suggest that military decision-making in the Trump White House is driven by something other than strategic national interest.
So what happens if Trump orders a nuclear strike against Iran or North Korea? Or Spain? What happens when a president who cannot be trusted to understand and contextualize an unfolding conflict situation orders an intervention of overwhelming force, leading to the possible deaths of millions? Is it legally possible to authenticate a launch order if it comes from a president who is mentally unfit? How many nuclear launch officers in the American military are asking themselves these questions right now? How many of our allies and adversaries are asking them?
The more irrationally the president acts, the more he tests the assumption that he alone controls America’s nuclear arsenal. If he is shown to have been compromised by Russian intelligence, an order to launch nuclear weapons will seem even more suspicious and problematic. Obviously, if he tries to launch a nuclear weapon for no reason, somebody further down the chain of command damn well better stop him. But what happens to the principle of civilian control of the military if a presidential launch order is countermanded by a general? And if he continues to damage his credibility, will President Trump be able to successfully order a nuclear strike — even if circumstances warrant?
The point is that when it comes to nuclear deterrence, uncertainty is dangerous. And the uncertainty surrounding Trump could actually increase the likelihood of nuclear confrontation.
Maj. Hering’s inconvenient question now seems like an opportunity squandered, lingering ominously unanswered in the era of Trump. Today, as then, American nuclear weapons officers rely on the sanity of the commander in chief to shield them from complicity in a potentially world-ending mistake. I have never envied them less. Who would want to twist the launch key on the say-so of Donald Trump?
As a historian, I rely on federal data to help tell stories about our collective past. So I am proud to work with Data Rescue Austin (#DataRescueATX), which is one of many local citizen archivist groups organized in the wake of last year’s election. #DataRescueATX works with national organizations like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) to identify, back up, and help preserve freely accessible federal data resources in the event that they are removed from public view and use. These organizations are particularly concerned with preserving federal data that supports climate and environmental research and advocacy. But the federal government also collects and distributes extensive social and economic data, which is also at serious risk of politicization and suppression. It is important to advocate for, protect, and preserve this data as well.
Accessible, reliable information is the lifeblood of democracy. So it is no historical accident that the United States’ federal government is the largest—and possibly the most effective—compiler, repository and disseminator of social and economic data in the history of the world. Aside from the federal government's crucial role in support of the hard sciences, arts, and humanities, the social and economic data it collects, preserves and distributes is absolutely foundational to what we know about ourselves, and to our ability to plan for the future. That vast trove of data is a vital part of the American civic tradition, helping to sustain and stabilize our legal and political orders.
Although civil authorities in America have been collecting basic census data since the colonial era, the large-scale, systematic use of federally collected social and economic data in policy-making dates back the mid-to-late 19th century. As both American society and the American economy grew larger and more complex during the “Age of Progress”, statistics became an increasingly useful way of understanding patterns of continuity and change, identifying and responding to economic and social problems, and developing a basis for rational planning. By the 1860s, the federal government was collecting data on manufactures, fisheries, agriculture, and social metrics like church membership, taxation rates, poverty and crime.
Among the most important milestones of federal statistical record keeping was the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Labor in 1884. Initially modeled after state labor agencies, the Bureau of Labor was tasked with compiling and disseminating statistics on American employment and productivity. The new bureau produced cutting edge work on both social and economic issues, and developed innovative statistical methods to better quantify and analyze the country’s rapidly changing economic and social landscape.
Today, that agency is known as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is part of the larger Department of Labor. The BLS has a proud history of measuring inflation, employment, pay rates, productivity, and consumer spending. It has served as the model for many of the data-gathering agencies that came after it: strictly non-partisan, highly rigorous, and well respected across the political spectrum. Its data have been used to craft better public policy. Collectively, these agencies accounted for only .18% of the federal budget in 2016, which is also a small fraction of the financial value—both to the private sector and the American public—of the data they produce. (For those interested in a deeper look at the role and importance of federal statistics, check out this joint report by the Hamilton Project-AEI).
For over a century, data gathering on American society and its economy has been a settled function of federal government. For over a century, that data has been used to guide decision-making in private industry, craft and hone public policy, and keep public officials accountable. No major national political figure since the Civil War has explicitly challenged the credibility—and even the utility—of the social and economic data collected by federal agencies.
Until now. During his successful run for the presidency last year, Donald Trump:
- loudly and repeatedly dismissed the accuracy of the jobs numbers collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed a strengthening job market under Obama.
- Suggested that the actual unemployment rate might be as high as 42%. He claimed that crime was rising toward “record levels” which is disproven by the work of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), whose statistics have shown overall crime to be near historic lows.
- Tweeted that 81% of all white homicide victims are killed by African Americans, for which he cited something called the “Crime Statistics Bureau--San Francisco,” which doesn’t exist. The FBI does exist however, and its statistics show that 15% of whites were murdered by blacks in 2014—an error factor of 5.4.
- Claimed that America’s GDP had dipped “below zero” for the first time ever. (He meant GDP growth, and it happens all the time.)
All of these statements are--and have been--easily disproven by federal data. And they comprise only a fraction of the untruths he has uttered—both during the campaign and as president—that run completely counter to what we know because of federal data. Yet rather than concede the proof of his errors, Donald Trump and his officials have doubled down on his demonstrably false claims, while at the same time impugning the press as “fake news,” and the federal agencies whose data contravenes his statements as part of an undemocratic “deep state.”
Rather than rising to the defense of federal data collection, the Republican Party, which controls both houses of Congress, has essentially adopted Trump’s war on federal information as their own. Current Republican bills both the Senate and the House would, for instance, prohibit federal funds from being used "to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing." Another Republican house bill threatens to make large sections of the American Community Survey—an important yearly survey sent to 3.5 million Americans per year since 1940—“voluntary” rather than legally mandated. This data has proven immensely valuable over the years, and its loss can only negatively effect future policy outcomes.
There's a grim logic to all of this. Aside from their historical value, the statistics gathered by executive agencies like the BLS are an important tool for grading our public servants. These numbers cut past the rhetoric and political spin to reveal the real-world consequences of actual public policies. As with all presidents before him, they will be among the truest measures of President Donald Trump--particularly as he compares to his immediate predecessor.
Trump and the Republicans are now in position to warp the federal government’s information regime to their will. As it happens, most of the agencies that gather social and economic data are part of the executive branch. The Trump administration has already moved strongly to subordinate and stifle the agencies under his direct control. Until this year, for example, Mick Mulvaney was a congressman from South Carolina. In 2011, Rep. Mulvaney was at the center of a movement of hardline conservatives to trigger a default on the federal debt, risking a possible global economic catastrophe. In 2013, he nearly single handedly blocked an emergency relief bill for victims of Hurricane Sandy by insisting that every dollar spent be offset by equal cuts somewhere else in the federal budget. He is now Donald Trump's head the Office of Management and Budget.
The head of OMB was already a powerful position. But last Monday, Trump signed an executive order instructing Mulvaney’s OMB to come up with a plan to “reorganize...or eliminate unnecessary federal agencies.” On paper at least, Mulvaney now has the power to wipe out whole executive agencies without oversight, justification, or recourse.
The Mulvaney appointment is of a piece with other personnel moves that undermine the core functions of crucial federal agencies within the executive branch. Trump has placed a man to rejects climate science in charge of the EPA. He has placed a man who believes that Hillary Clinton received millions of fraudulent votes in the last election in charge of the Department of Justice, and a woman who has worked openly to dismantle public schools in charge of its Department of Education.
These actions go beyond ideology. They are purposely destructive, unaccountable, and antidemocratic. And if there were any lingering doubts about the motives behind them, Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, laid them to rest at CPAC last month, when he swaggeringly vowed that the Trump administration would fight “every day” toward the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” By definition, an “administrative state” is a state that counts things. By destroying the federal government’s ability to produce and disseminate credible social and economic data, the Trump administration looks to strike a blow against the heart of our democratic system. In the information vacuum Trump and the Republicans are trying to create, the truth will be whatever they say it is.
All of which makes federal data preservation a fundamental act of resistance. Datarescue Austin is part of a nationwide effort to scrape as much data from federal servers as possible so that it can be safely backed up and preserved on private servers. We know that scientific data—particularly data which demonstrates the reality of climate change—is under threat under the current administration. But we also need to protect the social and economic data that tells us about our history, and helps us plan for our future. That data belongs to us. And right now, it is vulnerable.
But we also need the federal government to continue collecting data in order to maintain its consistency and comprehensiveness. That requires keeping close watch on what Mulvaney does to the federal statistical system, and pressuring congress to stop him if he should attempt to dismantle it under the phony guise of cost-saving. Below is a list of major at-risk agencies that collect social and economic data. Each is part of the Federal Statistical System of the United States--the decentralized network of federal agencies that produce data about the people, economy, natural resources, and infrastructure in the United States.
- Bureau of the Census (USCB) under US Department of Commerce: Conducts Decennial Census. http://census.gov/
- Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under US Department of Labor: Principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. http://www.bls.gov/
- National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) under the US Department of Education: Collects, analyzes, and publishes statistics on education and public school district finance information in the United States. http://nces.ed.gov/
- National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS): NASS conducts hundreds of surveys and issues nearly 500 national reports each year on issues including agricultural production, economics, demographics and the environment. NASS also conducts the United States Census of Agriculture every five years. http://www.nass.usda.gov/
- National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS): Provides statistical information to guide actions and policies to improve the health of the American people. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/index.htm/
- Energy Information Administration (EIA) under US Department of Energy: responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating energy information to promote sound policymaking, efficient markets, and public understanding of energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment. http://www.eia.gov/
- Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) under US Department of Commerce: provides official macroeconomic and industry statistics including the gross domestic product of the United States. http://www.bea.gov/
- Economic Research Service (ERS) under US Department of Agriculture: Provides information and research on agriculture and economics. https://www.ers.usda.gov (Site appears to be offline).
- Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) under US Department of Justice: Collects, analyzes and publishes data relating to crime in the United States. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/
- Statistics of Income Division (SOI) under IRS/Department of the Treasury: Collects and processes data so that they become informative and shares information about how the tax system works with other government agencies and the general public. https://www.irs.gov/uac/soi-tax-stats-statistics-of-income
- Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) under US Department of Transportation: Compiles, analyzes, and makes accessible information on the nation's transportation systems; collects information on intermodal transportation and other areas as needed; and improves the quality and effectiveness of DOT's statistical programs through research, development of guidelines, and promotion of improvements in data acquisition and use. https://www.bts.gov
- Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics (ORES), part of Social Security Administration: Provides statistical data on OASDI and SSI program benefits, payments, covered workers, and other indicators; Sponsors special-purpose survey data collections and studies to improve data for research and statistics related to social security issues; develops links between administrative record data and survey data for use in Social Security research and policy analysis. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/about/ORES.html
Permalink
The Republican Party has won for itself all three branches of national government by a combination of chicanery and sedition. They have secured the House thanks to gerrymandered districts and targeted voter suppression--strategies which evoke legitimate comparisons to the days of Jim Crow. They have fallen in line behind a president who never tells the truth, scapegoats the weak and vulnerable, and who probably conspired with the Russian government to beat Hillary Clinton last fall. They have stolen a Supreme Court nomination from a Democratic president, and radicalized their base so as to make bipartisan compromise a political impossibility.
And for all this, they have been rewarded with a once-in-a-century opportunity to remake American government into an undemocratic instrument of private wealth, programmed to transfer even more money from the poor and middle class, as well as the assets still held in common trust (e.g. public lands, natural resources, etc.), to the few at the very top.
But they haven’t won yet. To ensure the realization of these long-held goals, the entire Republican Party is now hard at work covering Trump’s messy tracks and propagating his cult of personality. At the same time, they are trying to ram through a repeal of the ACA before anyone can see it--a necessary first step toward a government exclusively by and for the hyperwealthy. And finally, Trump and the Republicans are trying to intimidate and delegitimize both the intelligence community and the free press--two of the remaining centers of opposition to his authoritarian rule. (Trump even pays homage to one of the "Great Ones" by resurrecting an old Stalinism, "enemy of the people," to castigate the press.) Should the Republicans fail in any of these endeavors, their ambitiously dystopic vision may never come to pass.
So now, we as a nation have finally reached the crossroads we’ve been moving toward since the era of Barry Goldwater. All of the antidemocratic things the Republican Party has done over decades to reach this point have gradually made it anathema to the foundational American ideals of transparent and representative governance. The GOP is now beyond accommodation, appeasement or redemption. And now that a strongman like Trump occupies the Oval Office, the death struggle between democracy and authoritarianism is no longer just over the horizon; it’s here. The foundational institutions of American democracy will either triumph or perish in the fight. The same is also true of the Republican Party.
This fight was not the will of the American people, but the choice of a handful of powerful Republicans, who deliberately made their party incompatible with America's democratic traditions in exchange for power. It's going to be ugly and destructive no matter what.
Should Republicanism/Trumpism prevail, the United States will likely become a one-party state, in which an informed and engaged citizenry plays no role. If, on the other hand, American democracy is to survive in anything more than name, the architects of this historical moment--which include names like Trump, Bannon, Sessions, McConnell and Ryan--will have to be sidelined and discredited, and the party they lead repudiated and possibly even abolished. That's where we're at. These men know very well the stakes of the game they play. Everyone else should know them too.
In the landmark 1974 Supreme Court case United States v. Nixon, the embattled President Nixon invoked executive privilege to stop the release of his taped conversations with indicted subordinates in the Oval Office, including discussions about the Watergate break-in. Nixon’s conception of executive privilege was breathtakingly broad. As his lawyer, James D. St. Clair put it, Nixon considered himself “as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and [...] not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.” Since the “court” of impeachment is actually Congress, Nixon was in fact arguing that as president, he enjoyed absolute immunity from the judiciary.
The Supremes didn’t go for it however, unanimously rejecting Nixon’s claim as “contrary to the basic concept of separation of powers and the checks and balances that flow from the scheme of tripartite government.” The president resigned two weeks later.
But even though Nixon lost his case, events were definitely trending in his direction. Remarkably, Watergate proved barely a speedbump on the road to an ever-more powerful “unitary executive.” For a number of reasons (the deepening dysfunctionality of American electoral politics not the least of them), the legislative and judicial branches have willingly ceded authority to the executive branch ever since.
Some of the blame for this goes to Gerald Ford. Preemptively declaring “our long national nightmare” to be over, Ford pardoned Nixon, foreclosing a rare opportunity to reign in the power of the presidency. A decade later, after Oliver North, one of Ronald Reagan’s military aides, began arranging funding for the Nicaraguan Contras via the illicit sale of arms to Iran, the Reagan White House pushed the concept of executive privilege just as far as Nixon had. Farther, perhaps, because Reagan actually got away with it--assuming symbolic (and thus meaningless) “responsibility” for the actions of his subordinates, of which he nevertheless claimed to be unaware.
But it was 9/11 that really supercharged the consolidation of executive power. The George W. Bush White House used the attack to engineer a fake casus belli for the invasion of Iraq, a geopolitical blunder of world-historic proportions. It created black sites, enacted torture, ramped up spying on American citizens, and shrouded its decision-making in ever-greater secrecy.
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was widely viewed as a popular repudiation of everything George W. Bush had stood for. But far from rolling back the enhanced security powers bequeathed to him by his predecessor, Barack Obama added to them, ordering several major military actions without any congressional approval, and prosecuting whistleblowers with unprecedented ferocity. Stymied by Congressional Republicans throughout both his terms, Obama also came to rely on executive orders to govern responsively.
Through it all, the guiding assumption of the national press and political class has remained that any president would, at the very least, abide by certain norms of behavior as to the use of their broad authority.
But in just his first week, Donald Trump has already shown the entire world the how dangerous it has always been to rely on the character of popularly elected chief executives as the only bulwark against authoritarianism.
Because Trump—a profoundly damaged human being if ever there was one—is now the most unfettered, institutionally powerful president in American history. He has more latitude to prosecute wars of choice than any president before him. He has more power and technical capacity to spy on anyone, anywhere.
Overseas, Trump’s White House can operate with less external oversight and more secrecy than any before it. Building on Bush II and Obama’s extensive use of drones, Trump commands more authority to order the assassination of anyone he deems a threat to national security. At home, he has more tools at his disposal with which to manipulate and punish the press, spy on political opponents, and intimidate potential whistleblowers.
Perhaps most worrisomely, Trump has more power than any executive before him to further degrade the power of the other two branches. With the help of Republicans in Congress, he is ramrodding profoundly unfit appointees to head crucial agencies with an absolute minimum of oversight. (Senators charged with confirming potential Education Secretary Betsy DeVos were arbitrarily limited to five minutes each.) And on the White House webpage describing the branches of the federal government, the judiciary branch temporarily disappeared altogether.
And thanks to his predecessors, Trump has plenty of rhetorical and legal ammunition with which to justify all of this. Indeed, the Trump administration is already defending executive overreaches like the refugee ban simply by repeating, ad nauseum, that the Obama administration did exactly the same things. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s serpentiform advisor, justified the refugee ban to one reporter by saying, “President Obama did it, now President Trump is doing it.” That’s a lie, of course. The Obama Administration never came close to barring whole classes of refugees based on their countries of origin. But get used to hearing it, because it will be the party line after every one of Trump’s executive overreaches, no matter how egregious. And unfortunately, if Trump's administration starts prosecuting journalists for doing their jobs, that line will contain more than a hint of truth.
Still, we are where we are. If there is a silver lining to any of this, it’s that the Trump presidency represents an opportunity to correct a historic mistake going back at least some forty years. Our government is comprised of three equal branches. In order to be truly “equal,” they have to serve as a check on one another at all times, not just when the opposite party is in power. The “unitary executive” is a historical lie, and a precondition to autocracy. Beyond just seeing Trump impeached, his opponents should look to restore balance to the federal branches. This requires targeting the House and Senate leaders for at least as much political pushback as we give the president himself. Until men like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell put country over party—or (preferably) are replaced by people who do—there's really no stopping Donald Trump.
Update: I note, with no particular satisfaction, that I posted this a few hours before the Trump administration night-fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who had refused to enforce last week's immigration ban. The Saturday Night Massacre it ain't; Trump is well within legal bounds to do this. But the White House press release accompanying her firing reads like it was written by a pre-pubescent Nixon himself, noting darkly that Yates has "betrayed the Department of Justice," and is "weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration."
It's worth noting that Sally Yates worked at the Justice Department for 27 years, serving administrations from both parties. To accuse her of "betraying" anything is both ludicrous and deeply unsettling. It's also worth remembering that while Trump can fire his legal staff whenever he likes, it is the AG's job to tell him when he's wrong, which is what Yates just did. At least that's what Jeff Sessions thinks the AG does, right?
If the shades of Nixon are this obvious from the cheap seats, I can only imagine how things look inside the Beltway these days. Yeesh.
Permalink
When the United States elects someone mentally and morally unfit for civic leadership as its top official, it invites a reckoning about the country--and the world's--systemic vulnerabilities.
So Trumpism is a thing now. The specifics of Trumpist ideology are still unclear, since the president-elect himself is too obtuse, dishonest, and contemptuous of the American tradition of representative government to have developed a cohorent political worldview. But clearly, Trumpism is a civic expression of some familiar and deeply human impulses--unreasoned fear, uncurbed spite, bullheaded ignorance and religious fundamentalism--just like every other authoritarian "ism" in memory, both here and abroad. Like every such movement before it, Trumpism disguises those underlying frailties under the trappings of strength and certainty.
Trumpism is also a natural consequence of America's deteriorating governing structure and traditions: the corporate capture of state and media power, income inequality, civic disengagement, the devaluation of the basic idea of the commons, and the degradation of civil liberties. As a result, we have now entrusted every organ of elected federal government to an avowed authoritarian and his political party.
It's a good bet that most establishment Republicans are also shocked by Trump's victory. Their takeaway from Mitt Romney's loss in 2012 was that the party needed to embrace comprehensive immigration reform to attract Hispanic voters, or they'd never win the presidency again. That was Marco Rubio's whole reason for being. And then the party went and nominated Donald Trump. He was seen by party regulars as a ruffian and a terrible electoral risk. He was supposed to lose, and they were supposed to pretend that he'd never existed.
But he won, with some help from Putin, the FBI, and yes, vote rigging. And now a radical, amoral Republican Party has a completely unexpected opportunity to roll back every progressive policy accomplishment since the Civil War. Their priorities are the priorities of their corporate masters: to wipe out ACA, roll back financial reform, destroy what remains of the union movement, and privatize Medicare, public education, and social security. They will challenge the very idea of federal environmental policy. They will gut workplace safety regulations, void rules governing overtime pay, etc., etc...
And unless the Dems can stop them somehow, they will definitely do serious damage to our country's electoral system. This will be the first time Republicans have controlled both houses and the presidency since Justice Roberts declared the 1965 Voting Rights Act obsolete in 2013's Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court case. So they'll be looking for more and better ways to lock in existing franchise restrictions and further suppress minority voting, or even to change how votes are counted. I expect Republicans to take a page out of Vladimir Putin's playbook by imposing heavy new restrictions on how American elections are monitored. Edit: I note here that Kris Kobach, Kansas' own vote cager extraordinaire, has been named to Trump's transition team.
In exchange for the ability to do everything they've ever wanted, Republicans will now pledge their fealty to Donald Trump. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is getting that little errand out of the way today. House Speaker Paul Ryan is claiming that Trump has a "mandate" despite losing the popular vote. Ryan's a liar by both temperament and profession, but that's probably the most blatant public whopper he's told so far. That's how you know an authoritarian is feeling confident.
I don't know yet what congressional Democrats can do to protect the basic functions of American democracy. But at the very least, every Republican judicial appointment--not just to the Supreme Court--must be fiercely opposed. Going forward, I don't want to hear a single congressional Democrat snivel about how "so-and-so Republican is really a straight shooter (Hi Jim!)" or that "this is the best we're going to get from this administration." I don't ever want to hear Dems talk about how they need to "work across the aisle" to "get something done for the American people," or any other such nonsense. No Republican uttered any of those words in the last eight years. Congressional Republicans refused to even grant a hearing to Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland for almost a year. Merrick f'n Garland! No congress in the history of the country had ever done that before. And not only did Republicans pay no political price for violating the constitution they claim to revere, but their gambit worked to perfection. With Trump's victory, congressional Republicans have successfully stolen a Supreme Court pick out from under a Democratic president. There are no rules anymore, which is an objectively terrible state of affairs. But that's how the ballgame is played now, Dems. You don't have to like it. But by God, don't wimp out. And whatever you do, don't let the Republicans put your presidential candidate in jail.
Here's another idea: stop talking about the Republican Party and Trump as if they aren't one and the same. There are no Republicans anymore, only Trumpists. Every Republican is, and should always be referred to, as a Trumpist for at least as long as he's in office. In writing, quotes, speeches, everything. There is no daylight between the party and the monstrosity at its head. So he should define them, not the other way around. Michael Moore's got some other pretty good ideas about how citizens can organize to oppose the Trumpist takeover of our government. But the point here is that we are now officially in opposition to self-proclaimed facism. The normal rules of decorum no longer apply.
Above all, don't despair. Overt demagoguery tends to have a short shelf life in American politics. The First Red Scare whipped up fears of bolshevist revolution in the United States, resulting in race riots and 1918 Sedition Act--a rather conspicuous violation of the First Amendment. But when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the architect of much of the Red Scare, warned the nation of a communist uprising planned for May Day 1920 and it didn't happen, he was laughed off the public stage and the Sedition Act was repealed. When Joseph McCarthy first burst onto the scene in 1949, he turned the federal government inside out, cynically repurposing genuine American fears about communism into a seemingly invincible partisan weapon. (Notably, Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy's odious chief counsel, was also a legal representative and close advisor to Donald Trump until Cohn's death in 1986.) But Joseph McCarthy also ultimately failed. The moment of his public demise, which came during the Army-McCarthy hearings, was recorded for posterity. Written on his political epitaph were Senator Joseph Welch's famous words, "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" It's a powerful reminder of where we've been, and it's worth rewatching this week.
By some measures at least, we've now entered a far darker time than either of the Red Scares. If you care about the environment and climate change, human rights, income inequality, the alleviation of poverty, national security, equal protection, racial equality, gender equity, public lands, government transparency, civil liberties, public health, financial and industrial regulation, the integrity of our elections, public safety, the future of American democracy, or just the basic Golden Rule, the next four years are going to be agonizing to witness, and for many, to endure. The white backlash has now been mainstreamed, and Trump's election will uncork a flood of racial and gender-based aggression and cruelty. But we are still free to assemble, still free to give of our time and our money, still free to speak. We are free to stand up for one another, to protect each other. And now we have to do all of those things like we have never done them before.
There will come another Joseph Welch moment. It won't come without effort, without concerted and dogged resistance. I don't know when, or how much damage Trumpism will do beforehand. And it may not be a moment at all, but rather a gradual and accumulating diminution of Trumpism's ability to inflict further harm on our body politic. Beneath Donald Trump and his party is the dustbin of history--silently awaiting their inevitable fall. And when it happens, Trumpism won't be a thing anymore. It will be an epithet.
“For some months, I have traveled and traversed the border in every sense of the word. I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population. To the Dominicans who were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among them, thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits, etc., and were thus prevented from enjoying in peace the products of their labor, I have responded, ‘I will fix this.’ And we have already begun to remedy the situation. Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue.”
— Rafael Trujillo, October 21, 1937
“I will get this done for you and for your family. We’ll do it right. You’ll be proud of our country again. We’ll do it right. We will accomplish all of the steps outlined above. And, when we do, peace and law and justice and prosperity will prevail. Crime will go down. Border crossings will plummet. Gangs will disappear. And the gangs are all over the place. And welfare use will decrease. We will have a peace dividend to spend on rebuilding America, beginning with our American inner cities. We’re going to rebuild them, for once and for all.”
— Donald Trump, August 31, 2016
October 2016 will mark the 79th anniversary of the so-called Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic. In the fall of 1937, the soldiers and police under the command of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo killed an estimated 10-15,000 Haitians living along the Artibonite River, which flows along a stretch of border between the two countries. The genocide went by many names: "El Corte," ("the cutting" in Spanish), Kout kouto (the "knife blow" in Creole), and the massacre du Percil (the Parsley Massacre) in French. The latter name originated from multiple accounts that Dominican soldiers differentiated between Haitians and Dominicans by holding up sprigs of parsley and forcing their potential victims to pronouce the Spanish word for the herb, perejil. Those who could not roll their Rs in convincingly Spanish fashion were immediately executed.
In the decades before the massacre, Haitians and Dominicans along the border had mixed fluidly. "Before the massacre," one Haitian survivor recalled, "in the frontier, although there were two sides, the people were one, united." In fact, families of both cultural heritages had lived together peacefully on both sides of the border for generations. Historians Richard Turits and Lauren Derby argue that the Parsley Massacre’s victims were in fact integral parts of a peaceful, multiethnic borderland community—one that had shown little sign of ethnic fracture. The society they had made together was Rafael Trujillo’s true target.
That society ended as quickly and violently as the lives taken by Trujillo’s soldiers. By 1939, every Haitian living near the border had either been killed or chased away. The Dominicans who remained were compelled by their government to guard against the Haitians’ return, and thereby socially reprogrammed to regard their former neighbors with hatred and suspicion (a trend that persists today). When confronted by the US about the atrocities, Trujillo justified the mass killings as a defensive move against an imaginary “pacific invasion” by Haitians. But the real objective of El Corte was the centralization and consolidation of state power in the Dominican Republic via the utter destruction a syncretic border culture and the militarization of its frontier. In that regard, it succeeded. Not coincidentally, the violent reconquest of the borderlands also aided Trujillo in his own quest for absolute political power, which he retained until his death in 1961.
The Parsley Massacre is one of many modern historical examples of the violent imposition of state power on national frontiers by despotically-inclined governments seeking to consolidate political power within an ethno-nationalist construct. To varying degrees, the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, the Holocaust and the Bosnian genocide all targeted borderlands and frontier regions as sites of ethnic cleansing and genocide, in the service of nation building and consolidation of political authority.
During his run for the presidency, Donald Trump has drawn a number of comparisons to various historical autocrats. His appeals to xenophobic nationalism, pathological self-regard, and crypto-authoritarianism find parallels in the examples of other well-known despots. Recently, Omar Encarnacion of Foreign Affairs explicitly likened Trump to Rafael Trujillo, placing the Republican nominee squarely within the caudillismo tradition of charismatic authoritarianism, common in modern Latin American history.
I have no idea how accurate these comparisons are. I hope we don’t have to find out. But I’m particularly struck by the similarities between the Trump and Trujillo quotes at the beginning of this post. Both of them take it as given that transnational borderland cultures are problems--problems that they alone, using the full legal and military might of the state, can solve. Both characterize non-natives and ethnic minorities as innately lawless and dangerous, and both posit border militarization and even ethnic cleansing as state-strengthening remedies. "Without a border," as Trump is fond of saying, "we just don't have a country."
The long and bloody history behind this kind of rhetoric is worrisome—particularly in border states like Texas, which already have violent and racially-charged borderland histories. (My friend and colleague Miguel Levario has written an excellent and moving history on the militarization of the Texas border.) But the fact that these words come from a candidate with no sense of—or respect for—the limits of presidential power makes them more frightening still.
A full year and a half into this campaign, it’s still basically impossible to make any predictions about what a Trump presidency would mean for domestic and foreign policy, because his policy proposals are so vague. But his proposed “big beautiful wall” and forced deportation of 11 million people aren’t just policy proposals, they’re threats. And though it may be difficult to predict what he'd actually do, it's pretty clear who and what he is threatening: the people, economies and cultures of La Frontera.
Permalink
Compensated by contact hour, adjuncts are paid to lecture. But they're still expected to teach.
It wouldn't be the first time a foreign power tried to sway the results of an American election by tapping into the political impulse of isolationism.
About a week after any particularly shocking or spectacular mass shooting, the nation is usually treated to the thoughts of Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association. Recall that one week after Sandy Hook, LaPierre blamed the mass murder of 20 children on “gun free zones” in schools, and claimed that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The real culprits, he said, were violent videogames, along with the country’s “refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill.” Coming as they did in the midst of a period of horror and grief, LaPierre’s comments became fodder for nationwide criticism and ridicule. Even ardently pro-2nd Amendment conservatives distanced themselves from him. But four months later, the two Sandy Hook-inspired bills proposing modest new restrictions on assault weapons and expanded background checks died in the Senate. And it wasn’t even a tough vote. Even after Sandy Hook, lawmakers paid absolutely no political price for their service to the American gun industry. Wayne LaPierre had paid it for them.
The 7-day mark for the Pulse Nightclub shooting came this past Sunday, when John Dickerson interviewed LaPierre on CBS' Face the Nation. This time around, the NRA frontman rejected the notion that the nightclub shooting had anything to do with targeting the LGBTQ community, or with the easy availability of tactical-grade firepower to a man known by the FBI to have radical Islamic inclinations. This time, according to LaPierre, the real issue was “terrorism.” One might imagine that someone interested in preventing terrorism would be ok with stopping people on a terrorist watchlist from buying assault weapons. But when pressed on that point, LaPierre argued that doing so would somehow be “tipping off the bad guys.” (Oddly, this argument has yet to be made against the no-fly list.) Unsurprisingly, the Senate voted down any meaningful gun control legislation yesterday: one day after LaPierre’s appearance on television, and eight days after the deadliest single-gunman massacre in modern American history. The pattern is clear: the “debate” about gun control has become a circular discourse that produces no change. Thousands more Americans will die because of it.
Strangely, we still don’t seem to have a good fix on exactly what Wayne LaPierre is. The media treats him as a thought leader on the issue of guns, even though everyone already knows exactly what he thinks. Wayne LaPierre is not a thought leader, or a politician, or an activist. He is not a true party to any debate over gun regulation, because he has no authority to make concessions on behalf of his principals—the gun manufacturers. He is merely an agent of a massive industrial apparatus that wants to stay politically invisible. He is a program on a recursive loop. His only job is to keep gun manufacturers and their congressional enablers from ever having to come to the negotiating table. Whenever anything particularly unfortunate happens involving a firearm in this country, Wayne LaPierre trots out onto the public stage and metaphorically lights himself on fire. Gun control advocates immediately challenge his over-the-top rhetoric, and the circle of gun control discourse remains closed, leading nowhere.
As long as LaPierre is treated as if he has anything of value to add to gun control debate, and as long as gun control advocates continue to be suckered into directly engaging with him in the political arena, then he is succeeding in his task. He is a red herring; a heat sink. His continued success means that his corporate paymasters, including Midway USA, Springfield Armory, Beretta, Sturm Ruger, Smith & Wesson and Taurus, need never cease—let alone answer for—their moral crimes. His continued success ensures that the politicians who faithfully serve the gun industry will continue to do so without consequence.
Unlike the vulnerable corporations cowering behind him, Wayne LaPierre cannot be shamed, bankrupted or politically defeated. He must be bypassed.
In a now-infamous 1981 interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater opined that the New Right no longer needed to be explicitly racist to carry the South. In fact, Atwater argued, by refusing to discuss race, while simultaneously pushing policies that “hurt…blacks…worse than whites,” Republicans could potentially “[do] away with the racial problem” altogether. In the decades since, artful phraseology (think welfare queens, forced bussing, states’ rights, super predators) has allowed conservatives to traffic in the politics of racial division while maintaining an outward veneer of “color-blindness.” It has also mainstreamed the conservative critique of the Civil Rights movement, making it legible and popular beyond the American South. When called out on the implicit racial divisiveness of this kind of political messaging, conservatives often counter by accusing critics of “playing the race card.” An ingenious rhetorical device, the Race Card simultaneously deflects blame for injecting race into politics, while clarifying and reinforcing the original coded message.
The “it’s not about race” strategy has worked out well for the modern Republican Party, to put it mildly. And it’s so easy...all you have to do is not mention race, ever! And when an opponent points out the disparate racial impacts of the policies you’re proposing, you hit ‘em with the Race Card! It’s such a familiar, tried-and-true tactic on the right that, even now, it’s almost incredible to see the Republican presidential nominee dispense so completely with pretense of racial opacity. To the extent that there is a deep uneasiness with Trump’s candidacy among Republicans, I suspect that his gleeful shredding of the Atwater playbook has a great deal to do with it. To Trump's most ardent supporters, Atwater's injunction against explicit political racism is just another manifestation of PC culture run amok. To the Republican establishment, many of whom owe their careers to "It's not about race-ism," what Trump is doing probably looks like political suicide, for him and for them.
And maybe it is. But if Trump even makes a good show of it, get ready for a wave of post-Atwater Republicans, who will no longer consider it necessary to disguise the racism at their movement's core.
In 2013--about the same time that the State of Michigan enacted a law enabling 'emergency managers' to take over financially-distressed municipal governments like Flint--the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill make it easier to force the regionalization the state's public utilities.The law, which was ostensibly written to improve the efficiency of municipal services, appeared to specifically target the city of Asheville's water system, which was to be annexed to the Buncombe County regional water authority. The city successfully challenged the "transfer law's" constitutionality in trial court, but lost on appeal. Oral arguments before the state Supreme Court began this week. Many see the transfer law as a first step toward privatizing a major chunk of Asheville's revenue-generating urban infrastructure.
Cities have always been battlegrounds when it comes to the control of public services. Today, the forces arrayed against local, community control is higher than ever. Economically stressed communities like Flint are facing unprecedented pressure to give up local control, or risk losing basic services altogether. But it isn't just the Flints of the world facing these pressures. Uber's recent battle with the city of Austin over fingerprinting its drivers was actually an attempt strong-arm the city into exempting ride sharing companies from municipal regulation. AT&T just successfully killed municipal broadband expansion in Tennessee. Charter schools chip away at the public education model that serves most American children.
But water is different. If Flint has taught us anything, it's that water service should not be run like a business. For over 100 years, local public utilities have supplied American cities with clean, safe, and affordable water. And while many of these municipal systems do require expensive updates, privatization is not the mechanism for making those necessary investments.
Permalink
To talk public policy in the context of Donald Trump's presidential campaign kind of misses the point of Trump-as-politician. This should worry Democrats. Earlier this week, Paul Krugman gamely laid out a few of the almost preposterous inconsistencies in Trump's evolving tax policies--particularly in light of his refusal to release his own returns. Much of what Krugman writes is so true as to be self-evident. And, a la Krugman, Democrats will continue to hammer Trump every day from now until November on his stunning ignorance of foreign and domestic policy, glaring inconsistencies, and seemingly pathological aversion to concrete proposals. They will do this knowing all the while that in the end, it might be no more effective than throwing water on a grease fire.
Clinton is running her second presidential campaign, but this is Trump's thousandth pissing match. His tactics and strategy amount to the same thing: making himself look good by making her look bad. And he's well practiced at that game. Ultimately, Trump's proposition--that public policy is no longer relevant to our politics--is probably the closest thing he's got to an actual policy proposal. If he's right about that, and the Democrats are playing the wrong game, he may win. The fact that nobody has any idea what he'd do afterward is a feature, not a bug.