Month: July 2017

David Freedlander didn’t get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to cooperate with him while he was writing his profile of him for Politico, and that is apparently the norm. Cuomo doesn’t want people discussing his presidential ambitions. Nonetheless, I imagine that Cuomo isn’t displeased with the piece since it paints him as a ruthlessly effective politician who gets shit done and takes no prisoners.

Overall, it’s a good piece because it provides a comprehensive history of Cuomo and his time in Albany, and it takes in commentary from a wide spectrum of views including admirers, progressive opponents, and even fearful members of Trump’s team. But there is one rather significant problem.

It begins by asking if Cuomo can win over liberals if he runs for president. It correctly sees this as his largest obstacle. It then goes into admirable detail about why this won’t be easy considering his record of vindictively antagonizing progressives and welshing on his promises. This is followed by a long and somewhat convincing argument that he’s checked off a whole lot of boxes on the progressive wishlist: free college, gay marriage, stricter gun control, a relaxation of Rockefeller-era drug laws, and a ban on fracking. In other words, he’s fought with liberals but he’s also delivered for them. Liberals should recognize his effectiveness.

And that’s all fair. But then the piece concludes with stuff like this:

It would be impossible to mount a presidential campaign in this day and age without a groundswell of support from the party’s liberal edge. People close to Cuomo know he needs to do some repair work in New York, end his bitter feud with [NYC Mayor Bill] de Blasio, push for a Democratic legislature.

He knows they will never love him. Cuomo still sees himself as an outer-borough guy, his advisers say, as the kind of person whose favorite weekend hobby is working on old cars. Those mandarins at the Times editorial board or perusing Mother Jones in the checkout line of the Park Slope Food Co-Op who think politics is about pretty words and debating ideas will never get it. “He thinks the far left think they are so much smarter and more righteous than everyone else, and that if you don’t constantly kiss their ass that there is something repugnant about you,” said one adviser. “He really doesn’t care. He’s got the unions on his side, and he knows that’s worth more than whatever the 800 ivory tower liberals in New York think about him.”

It’s hard to see how Cuomo’s “advisors” think these kinds of comments will fix the rift that has developed between their champion and the progressive left. It’s really this kind of disrespect that has prevented Cuomo from getting the credit he actually does deserve. He and his minions have punched down so hard on his critics that he’s created an army of folks for whom he’s not just an enemy. His very name is now an epithet. Here’s an example from the piece:

“The worst of the worst,” said Nomiki Konst, a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention and frequent cable TV defender of the candidate who now serves on the Democratic National Committee’s Unity Commission. “Andrew Cuomo is somehow the only politician in America who still thinks neoliberalism and triangulation work, who opens up the Blue Dog playbook and says, ‘How can I use this to run for president?’”

Cuomo’s approach has worked on a lot of levels and he’s got good enough poll ratings that he could probably be reelected to another term as governor without much difficulty. But the perception that he’s from the wrong wing of the Democratic Party is widespread and is going to be tough to overcome in any effort to win the nomination for the presidency.

He’ll be able to go down the list of things he’s accomplished and make the case that he’s a solid progressive, but his hardened enemies will make things tough for him. If he really has the ambition to be president, and I do not doubt that he does, then he needs his supporters to stop trashing the progressive left.

As things stand now, he’s become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. He’ll need to change that perception substantially, and I honestly don’t think he can accomplish it just by banning fracking and providing a free college program. He has to learn to turn the other cheek and make some amends. And I think those are two things that he’ll never learn to do.

He’ll make some halfhearted efforts, but he’s going to argue what this profile argues, which is that he’s an asskicker who can’t take on any opponent and vanquish them. He’s a winner who will get results.

That could be enough in a world where he wasn’t perceived as a kind of anti-Sanders persona. In the real world, though, progressives will go to the wall to deny him the nomination.

The key point:

Putin lies as a display of power. Only powerful people can lie and get away with it. The more blatant the lie, the greater the show of power when your listener cannot or dare not contradict you.  

Authoritarians have a standard operating procedure.  This is one of the key points.  Those who enable this enable the other elements of an authoritarian state, including its use of police power.

The US media, and especially the print media, are playing as foil and enabling this by not daring to report what is factual and true as counterpoint but leaving everything as a matter of opinion.

A very curious statement about a head of state:

Putin is a persuasive speaker because his arguments are internally coherent once you accept his premise that Russia always means well.

And what US Presidents had that Trump completely misses.

Oliver Stone seems to have treated Putin the way the US media treat Trump.

Except for scenes like this:

That said, nobody could properly prepare to quiz Putin about his work, because nobody outside the inner circle of the Russian government has much idea of what Putin does all day, nor how his power is exercised. How does a small man with highly polished shoes persuade a nation of 144 million people to live in awe of him? When Putin invites Stone into the Kremlin situation room to observe what he says are his daily video-linked conversations with regional and Defense Ministry officials, it is impossible to tell whether the banalities they exchange–“Right now there are no traffic jams in the Ural Federal District”–have been scripted for the occasion, or whether that is what the governance of Russia is like most of the time.

The hope post-Yeltsin had to do with safety:

There is a touching moment when Putin thinks back to his appointment as acting prime minister in 1999. His main concern, he says, was “Where to hide my children.” Russia in those days–to some extent even now–was The Sopranos writ large. A respectable adversary was one who might kill you but not your family.

In 2001 I sat by chance behind Putin’s two daughters at a recital given by the violinist Vadim Repin in the Moscow Conservatory. Even with bodyguards on either side of them, their presence in public was an act of daring. In those days it was possible to invest at least some hope in a president who allowed his daughters out to enjoy Beethoven.

The fact that most in the US don’t know about Putin’s family speaks of politics in Russia, but it also speaks of how the leader is framed for US audiences.  The stereotype of the Russian bear is a geopolitical statement and theory that sometimes gets in the way in the same way as some other nations framing of the US as the home of the ugly Yanqui.  Too bad that Trump is trying his best to live up to the stereotype.  Putin, like Krushchev, is doing the opposite.  That worked well for Krushchev in 1962 at the height of the blowback from his biggest strategic miscalculation.

It is hard to say when authoritarianism ends and exactly how it comes to pass.  For Spain it was the restoration of the monarchy that brought a democratic constitutional monarchy like many other in Europe.

Who knows what these trends portend or really what Putin’s reaction to them will be.  Some authoritarians under the right kind of pressure have given way to more democratic forms in practice.  Given the experience in the Duma under Yeltsin and the general economic collapse of Russia in the mid-1990s, not to mention the conversion of the major managers to oligarchs effectively through the theft of former state property, Putin is likely to hold the reins tight.  Too tight, and there is change:

It is, of course, not only on the American side that things change. If Stone had gone to the Kremlin this past week he would have had to maneuver his way past some of the biggest anti-Putin demonstrations in years, led by the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, as Masha Gessen reported on June 14. For Stone, Putin is still the miracle worker who got Russia back into working order after it had collapsed under Yeltsin. But for most of the past decade the Russia economy has been undermined by low oil prices and the cumulative effects of corruption and cronyism. Navalny’s rise strongly suggests that fatigue with Putin is growing to the point at which a serious political challenge is becoming possible–or, at least, a challenge might be possible if Putin did not control the political process, and if intransigent critics of Putin did not have an awkward habit of ending up dead.

In all this, it is good to remember that Russia has parity (by intention and agreement) with the US in nuclear weapons.  The trend so far has been toward further reductions.  When conditions permit the next round are uncertain, given the need for an enemy as the Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan wars grind on without a definite conclusion. An enemy that can rally the American people to transcend their political and cultural differences.  That is a dangerous combination.

At the moment Putin is the only Russian head of state available to bargain with.

Illinois House overrides Rauner vetoes of income tax increase, budget.  

The Illinois Senate had already overridden the veto with Republicans joining to avoid Illinois bonds receiving a junk rating.

“If I decide to press my button to override the governor, it doesn’t make me any less of a conservative Republican than the rest of the people standing here,” he said. “It makes a person decide he has to vote for his district. He has to think about all the people in his district to the best of his ability.”

– Republican Assemblyman

Take THAT, Governor Ruiner! (sic)

While trying to explain both why the Republicans have so few women in the Senate and why they should run more women as candidates, Nathan L. Gonzales of Roll Call offers this observation:

One seemingly obvious way to avoid Republican men’s temptation to offer their biological views on abortion and choice is to nominate a woman.

He’s obviously hearkening back to Senate candidates Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana who both lost five years ago when they expressed their views on pregnancies that result from rape. Akin said that rape pregnancies don’t happen and Mourdock said that they’re God’s will.

Presumably, no woman would ever say something so stupid and offensive. I guess that’s the argument. But isn’t it sad that anyone would think this was a necessary precaution? And how does that work when trying to recruit women to run? Please represent this party that is full of rape-baby apologists?

I read analysis like this and it’s not so much that I think it’s wrong exactly as that I just don’t ever want to get to the point where I think it’s normal.

How about recruiting women to run because you think they’ll be good politicians and excellent public servants?

And how about having a party that’s not so chock full of nutcase men that you think women’s primary value is that they won’t say something so dumb and toxic as to lose you a winnable seat?

If you show up in court without a lawyer visibly by your side, the judge will probably ask you if you have “representation.” That’s what lawyers do for their clients. They represent them. It’s also what political parties do for their clients. And we hope that their clients are at least sometimes the people in the states and districts the party’s politicians hope to represent. Too often, it seems, they consider their real clients to be big donors.

Nonetheless, we call the lower chamber of Congress the House of Representatives (or, alternatively, “the People’s house”) for a reason. Political parties aspire to place members in Congress where they can represent the interests of the people who are members of their party.

Mark Penn appears to have a loose grasp on this concept. He says “The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.”

It’s doubtful that it’s a good idea to pursue a strategy with the explicit aim of rejecting the values and interests of your clients. A lawyer who did this would lose the trust of the community he served. He might even be disbarred.

The better way to look at things is that the Democratic Party needs to be able to serve more clients than they are presently serving. There are too many communities right now who feel like the Democrats aren’t offering the kind of representation they want. They can find ways to meet these clients’ demands without, as a price, suddenly failing to do the one thing that they’re really fairly good at.

In fact, when you present this a zero-sum game, it becomes something you can’t accomplish. If the only way to add new clients is to lose the clients you already have, then you can’t grow. If you figure that your clients are loyal and, in any case, don’t have anywhere else to go for representation, you’ll discover that you’ve overestimated the strength of your position. There will be negative consequences if you keep going into court and doing a lousy job.

The way to look at this is not that the party has lost the support of white working class voters by doing too good of a job representing the people in their urban strongholds. The party has lost support from the white working class by doing a lousy job of representing the white working class. And there are a whole host of areas where the interests of the white working class and the Democrats’ urban base are not in conflict.

For Penn, the Democrats’ problem is that they’ve criticized the police and gone too far in pushing LGBT rights. They’re too soft on illegal immigration, and they’re proposing too many “socialist” solutions. But that’s how the Democrats represent their clients. Their problem isn’t that they do this too well. They’re problem is that these issues aren’t addressing what is foremost on the minds of people living outside of the large population centers of the country.

If these people want someone to outlaw abortion, they’re going to hire the other firm. If they want someone to help them with the opioid epidemic then they might well hire the Democratic firm. If the Democrats would develop a plan for revitalizing small-town entrepreneurship and regional equality, they could take that plan to these communities and make a case that they’re best prepared to revitalize them economically.

If the Democrats have a problem it’s their impulse to impose a uniformity on the party that just won’t work if the goal is to compete everywhere. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy when he rolled it out as chairman of the DNC. Progressives want the party to compete everywhere. What they don’t want is to have the party speak with two voices on key issues. That’s understandable, but it’s easy to make the perfect the enemy of having any political power on the state or national level.

Too often, progressives operate from the reverse side of the same basic paradigm that Penn is using, which is that any emphasis on attracting white working class voters must of necessity involve a zero-sum calculation where they come out on the short end of the stick.

Admittedly, things can get uncomfortably fuzzy at the juncture where contentious issues meet. But progressives need to be mindful that civil rights, the environment and social justice are best served and protected when the broad left has majorities. If a little fuzz is the price for obtaining those majorities, the tradeoff is well worth it.

Living at all times at that intersection where divisions are emphasized and hashed out is not a productive way of going about our business. The productive course is figuring out how the party can serve the interests of potential clients in more communities without at the same time failing to represent the left.

Mark Penn doesn’t attempt this. At all.

This is why he is a legendary failure as a political strategist. But, to be honest, he’s only a mirror image of the same problem a lot of people on the left are having figuring out how to regain power. It’s one part of lack of imagination and two parts lack of effort. Progressives are always giving me reasons why white working class voters won’t support the Democrats even though the whole point is that their support elected Barack Obama and not Hillary Clinton. Their support gave the Democrats control of most state legislatures in the 1990’s and their lack of support is locking the Democrats out of power in a large majority of states in the present.

Mark Penn is right about only one thing, and that is that the Democrats are suffering terribly due to their loss of support from white working class people. The solution is not to try to become a party that serves white working class people at the expense of the still-loyal members of the party. That suggestion is idiotic on its face. The solution is to find a way to represent working people regardless of their race, and if that means that the party isn’t as coherent as some people would like, that’s just too bad.

Front-paged @ European Tribune

Ahead of the G20 in Germany’s Hamburg, Trump is expected to give a major policy speech. His White House team has made a judgment this will take place in Poland, a nation that suffered greatly under the boots of Nazi’s and equally when the Red Army crossed borders and occupied the state during the 20th century.

Today’s Poland is run by a fascist leadership with similar appeals to its citizens as Trump has in America: nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric or rather against asylum-seekers from outside of the EU. Poland has welcomed a flow of migrants from neighbouring Ukraine which is suffering from economic woes and corruption.

The Polish Prime Minister, in a speech in the European Parliament, claimed that Poland did not have the capacity to accept any Syrian refugees, as it has already accepted one million Ukrainian refugees (Chapman 2016). However, while the migration flow has indeed increased, neither the purported volume, nor the declared character of migration has been reflected by the official data. The vast majority of Ukrainians coming to Poland seek gainful employment and are not a burden on the Polish taxpayer, but rather contribute to the country’s economic growth.

Poland is at the heart of criticism for EU capital Brussels and the role of giant economic power Germany.

Poland is also the point nation for neocon’s New Europe and a special role in rekindling the Cold War 2.0 from president George Bush,  Defence minister Rumsfeld, NATO’s General Breedlove to Obama’s State Department with HRC and Victoria Nuland – Cheney’s right hand on foreign policy vs. Russia.

Chances are, Trump’s major policy speech will likely unite a block of nations Trump has managed to alienate in his first 100 days of his presidency. I’ll be watching his speech as it happens.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is up for re-election in a few months and she has secured her lead in the polls and shown to be the leading statesman (statesperson) in Europe and on the world stage. Merkel is pulling all the right punches in domestic issues in a conservative constituency.

○ Historic legislative victory in Germany: Same-sex Marriage

 « click for more info »

○ Poll: Germans want Merkel to remain as chancellor | DW |
○ The shadow of the Smolensk air crash over Polish politics

‘Trump needs some nice pictures from Europe,’ and Poland will likely oblige | WaPo |

WARSAW — President Trump arrived here late Wednesday in a country where the ruling Law and Justice party has called for Poland to “rise from its knees” — a phrase that carries echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. The populist, nationalist government has also spurned calls for European nations to welcome in Muslim asylum seekers, just as Trump has sought to halt the flow of Syrian refugees to America.

Government leaders have even promised to bus in throngs of people from rural Poland — the heart of the ruling party’s support — to cheer the American president as he delivers a speech Thursday in the less-supportive capital city of Warsaw.
Trump’s decision to visit Poland ahead of a Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg this week is widely viewed as a pointed embrace of his ideological allies here — and a shot across the bow at Europe’s establishment forces, led by Germany and France.

For both governments, the visit is a chance to bolster their alliance at a time of heightened tensions with the rest of Europe. Trump has raised hackles with his friendly posture toward Russian President Vladi¬mir Putin and his rejection of the Paris climate deal, while Polish President Andrzej Duda is in the midst of a roiling debate over controversial constitutional changes spearheaded by the Law and Justice party.

Illiberal Democracies in the EU: the Visegrad Group

Poland’s accession to the EU was conditional to limit its citizens spreading across Europe. Germany had set limits for Polish migrants, other western European nations were more open and suffered the consequences of undercutting wages and labor rights. Polish migrants flowing into the UK played a major role in EU/Brussels bashing by UKIP leading to the Brexit referendum and its surprise outcome.

○ Across Fading Borders: The Challenges of EastWest Migration in the EU – Open Society Foundation (2008)
○ Fear of Eastern European EU migrants fuels Brexit campaign | EurActiv |
○ Europe: The Journey Ahead – May 2017 [pdf]

New Polish government shut down diplomatic missions and focused its foreign policy …

Poland’s head of diplomacy said that the increasing of Poland’s security is of fundamental importance for his country. “Here we are focusing our efforts on co-operation with NATO, the United States and Great Britain while at the same time not neglecting co-operation with our other allies. As a result of intense diplomacy we have already been successful. An Alliance document was approved, which states that the eastern flank will contain a permanent presence of NATO troops. We are also putting emphasis on co-operation with our neigbours,” Minister Waszczykowski said, pointing to Poland’s increased engagement with the Visegrad Group.

My recent diary …

○ The Applebaum and Sikorski Show

My earlier diaries …

○ Saakashvili to GOP: Investigate Obama’s Poor Performance
○ US Policy of Military ‘Re-alignment’ and Obama’s Military Think-tank
○ Putin’s Response to the Color Revolutions of Regime Change

Hypocrisies abound as report highlights Saudi links to UK extremism | France24 |

While Saudi Arabia accuses Qatar of aiding extremism, a think tank report released Wednesday said Riyadh was funding hardline Islamism in the UK. But with the British government refusing to release its own report, immediate answers seem unlikely.

 « click for more info »

“Since the 1960s, Saudi Arabia has been committed to a policy of promoting the kingdom’s hardline interpretation of Wahhabi Islam globally,” said a damning report by the Henry Jackson Society [by most definitions, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant].

The report’s release came at a sensitive time for Saudi Arabia, as the kingdom – along with the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt – are accusing Qatar of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organisation that has directly or indirectly participated in the democratic process in several Muslim-majority countries.

While the report has accused Riyadh of hypocrisy, the Saudi Embassy in London has dismissed its findings as “categorically false”.

But Saudi Arabia is not the only kingdom to be accused of official hypocrisy in the fight against Islamist extremism.

Weeks after the British monarch announced a government plan to establish a Commission for Countering Extremism in the UK, her subjects continue to be denied access to a “public” inquiry into Saudi funding of Wahhabi extremism in the UK.

The inquiry was commissioned in January 2016, while Theresa May was Britain’s home secretary (the UK equivalent of interior minister). As prime minister, May is believed to have received the inquiry findings six months ago, but has continued to resist pressure to release it.

Terror funding report: Calls grow for release of ‘sensitive’ Home Office document ‘pointing finger at Saudi Arabia’ | The Independent |

Trump and King Salman talk a big, big arms contract | The Atlantic |

The U.S. State Department approved the sale of $1.4 billion in military training and equipment to Saudi Arabia as part of a larger arms deal signed by President Trump in May, the Pentagon announced Monday. Prior to his two-day visit to Saudi Arabia last month, Trump sanctioned a deal spearheaded by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, that would provide the nation with around $110 billion in defense items such as tanks, fighter planes, combat ships, and precision-guided bombs over the next ten years.

 « click for more info »

○ US and Saudi Arabia agree ‘$350 billion arms deal’ | Al-Arabya |
…
Last month, The New York Times reported that Kushner was instrumental in brokering a deal over the radar system–known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD. During a meeting with high-level Saudi officials, Kushner reportedly called the CEO of Lockheed Martin, the system’s prime contractor, and asked her to drive down the price. The CEO later referred to the deal  as “historic” and said her company was proud to be a part of it. A White House Official also called the deal “a significant expansion of the over seven-decade long security relationship between” Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

Trump Just Strengthened the House of Saud in the Gulf Region

○ Deep State Signs $12bn F-15 Contract w Qatar
○ Undeniable Blowback from Decades US Foreign Policy – 1996

Might add the US could not have accomplished this without compliance of western European allies. At first the old colonial powers with self interest for oil, gas, uranium and expansion of corporate capitalism. Later with the addition of New Europe, the new “democratic” states of Eastern Europe still fumigating with anger from decades of suppression by the former Soviet Union.

With the extreme rise of inequality since the Reagan years of the eighties, continued for over a decade by neoliberal Third Way economics, the anger of the voter base was easy prey to nationalists like UKIP’s Farage, Dutch Geert Wilders and the ultimate hero of American alt-right and fascism Donald Trump.

[Links added are mine – Oui]

Blowback | The Atlantic – 1996 |

The CIA poured billions into a jihad against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, creating a militant Islamist Abraham Lincoln Brigade believed to have been involved in bombings from Islamabad to New York. Is Bosnia next?

One Friday evening, just after sunset prayers, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman climbed into a camouflaged truck in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set off for his first trip inside Afghanistan. It was 1985, he told me later, and he had just spent three years in Egyptian prisons, where he had been severely tortured as he awaited trial on charges of issuing a fatwa resulting in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat [by the Muslim Brotherhood and Ayman al-Zawahiri]; and  a military court later acquitted him of that, and of a related conspiracy charge. (Last January in New York the sheikh was sentenced to life imprisonment for seditious conspiracy to wage a “war of urban terrorism against the United States.”) As he settled into the back seat of the U.S.-supplied truck, the sheikh, who was then forty-seven and had been blind since infancy, was helped into a flak jacket by the fundamentalist Afghan resistance leader Gulbaddin Hekmatyar.

At that time the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan, and the United States was supporting the Afghan resistance; Hekmatyar, though he was one of the most stridently anti-Western of the resistance leaders, was receiving roughly half the arms that the CIA was supplying. The sheikh had first met Hekmatyar in Saudi Arabia a number of years before, and they were friends. They had much in common: both were exceedingly charismatic religious populists; both had committed their lives to jihad, or Islamic holy war; both were fiery orators. They were both given to elliptical, colorful turns of phrase, and their shared message was clear: the imperative to overthrow a secular government — whether in Afghanistan or Egypt — and establish an Islamic state.

 « click for info Baghdad Pact »

…
SIXTEEN years have passed since the CIA began providing weapons and funds — eventually totaling more than $3 billion — to a fratricidal alliance of seven Afghan resistance groups, none of whose leaders are by nature democratic, and all of which are fundamentalist in religion to some extent, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. Washington’s financial commitment to the jihad was exceeded only by Saudi Arabia’s. At the time the jihad was getting under way there was no significant Islamist opposition movement in Saudi Arabia, and it apparently never occurred to the Saudi rulers, who feared the Soviets as much as Washington did, that the volunteers it sent might be converted by the jihad’s ideology. Therein lies the greatest paradox of the bombing in Riyadh: it and the explosions in Peshawar and Islamabad could well prove to be part of the negative fallout — or “blowback,” in intelligence parlance — of the U.S.- and Saudi-orchestrated Afghan jihad.

The bombings — the first such terrorist attack in Saudi history, and among the worst in Pakistan’s — were the clearest warnings yet of an ominous escalation in the conflicts between the governments in Cairo and Riyadh and their Islamist foes. And the carnage in Islamabad — the fourth attack against the Egyptian govrnment abroad in recent months (Mubarak narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa) — indicated that Egypt’s militant Islamic groups, facing an increasingly vengeful crackdown at home, were transferring their four-year-old war to the international front. U.S. policymakers were stunned. In less than a week the vulnerabilities of three of Washington’s pivotal regional allies had become clear.

FBI failed to translate the trove of documents after the 1993 Twin Towers attack – Bojinka plot

○ Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood under Nasser in the 1950s
○ Egypt’s Nasser and Soviet Foothold in ME
○ If you criticize policy, you are anti-American by Noam Chomsky

Came across this excellent front-page article by BooMan …

○ A Conspiracy of Patriotism – Dec. 2005

The way David Petraeus describes U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump is hard to quickly summarize. I guess he’s basically saying that the foreign policy establishment, including the key figures in Trump’s cabinet, is like a really sturdy ship with lots of ballast with an excellent crew. While it might be true that the captain is charting an erratic zig-zag course, there’s little danger that the ship will get lost or capsize. In fact, the basic structure and crew is so solid that it’s “immaterial” whether or not the captain is mentally ill because he is incapable of doing any lasting harm.

This is nonsense, of course. Trump is destroying America’s credibility on the world stage, and there is now statistical evidence to support this. Pew Research recently surveyed people in 37 nations, and only the people of Israel and Russia have a better opinion of Trump’s America than they had of Obama’s. In most cases, the drop-off is very large. We’re down 83 points in Sweden, for example, and 75 points in Germany and the Netherlands.

Moreover, not every impulsive, ill-informed, ill-considered decision can be corrected by Trump’s staff and the foreign policy establishment. Petraeus cites a few cases of this happening, like when Trump seemed to waffle on the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine or the One-China policy. Petraeus assured us that the failure to reassure Europe about our commitment to Article 5 of NATO has been rectified and that our Syria policy is ultimately on a sound course. But some decisions can’t be taken back.

What happens when Trump gives an order that commits us to a course of action? And, however wise our foreign policy establishment might be (and recent history calls this premise into serious question), what happens when they don’t agree with each other and a mentally ill person needs to make the final call?

Anyone who says that it’s okay to have a mentally ill captain isn’t a serious person. We’re now faced with making a decision about whether we can wait around until after North Korea has miniaturized their nuclear weapons to the point that they can place them on ICBMs before we respond. Does Trump understand what might be required of our nation if we decide to take preventive military action against Pyongyang. Does he know what will happen to Seoul and perhaps Tokyo? Does he even know what China did the last time we had a conflict on the Korean peninsula or what would be required to prevent a potentially nuclear-armed conflict with them?

Before anyone even thinks of committing us to that kind of risk, they’d have to understand all of it. They’d have to prepare for it. One reason we didn’t win in Korea the last time is because we weren’t ready for it. There are enormous diplomatic and alliance-building tasks that would be involved, and those same types of tasks will be required to settle the matter without war.

We’d also need a leader who had some credibility with the American people and with Congress. Even if Trump is mentally fit in some ways, he doesn’t have what it takes to meet these challenges. Petraeus should know this and I think he does. Why he says otherwise is anybody’s guess, but he’s not helping.

The stakes are far too high here for this kind of screwing around with the truth. People like Petraeus need to stop bullshitting us and themselves and get on board with making sure we’re prepared for what’s coming. We’ll never be prepared as long as Trump is the final decision-maker.

I really like the piece Nancy LeTourneau wrote this morning. She titled it Dear Trump Voters: The 1950’s Aren’t Coming Back, but it’s actually about more than that. Obviously, we can’t return to the past. In most cases, we wouldn’t want to anyway. We are creatures of our own time and wouldn’t feel at home in another.

Her piece is really about dispositions and the difference between those who have an appetite for change and those who want to protect the social order that exists or that has existed for most of their living memory. She calls the latter attitude a “confederate” disposition, and I think she provides a keen insight when she highlights the lack of legitimacy unwelcome democratic outcomes have for Trump supporters and Tea Party types.

A democratic process that could result in the election of Abraham Lincoln wasn’t respected because it signaled that political efforts to change the social order preferred in the South had some kind of sanction from the people. In a similar manner, a process that could result in a black president or a woman president was not respected. That process could be attacked by taking measures to suppress the vote. Maybe it could be attacked by colluding with a foreign country.

For my purposes, though, I’d like to take a little heat out of this explanation. What I want to take away from it isn’t so much that there are people who feel threatened by democracy when it creates change they don’t want. If there are people who’d prefer to live in a country where women don’t compete with men for jobs, where Jim Crow is widespread, where homosexuality is a crime, where we have no environmental or consumer protection whatsoever, where Medicare and Medicaid don’t exist, well…those people don’t interest me much except insofar as they’re winning politically. I don’t want or believe that we can get their votes. I only want to figure out how to beat them.

We can call these people “confederates” if we want. I think it’s a useful way of making a point about human psychology. We can call them “deplorables,” too, considering that they have attitudes about women and race and human sexuality that can’t or shouldn’t be translated into policy in a modern society. We should certainly be mindful of their contempt for representative government and the legitimacy it brings.

But we tend to exaggerate how many of these people there really are, and we also are perhaps too unwilling to admit how many of them have spent most of their lives voting for Democrats or how reliant we have been and still are on winning political support from at least some of them. The truth is that people are more complicated than these caricatures. It’s a simple fact that many people voted for Trump because they were attracted to some of his racist themes but also voted for a black candidate four or eight years earlier because they made a different calculation. This often seems too difficult for people to grasp. But you can see it here in black and white:

Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton’s defeat: Her base didn’t turn out, Donald Trump’s did and the difference was too much to overcome.

But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.

Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.

It might seem impossible for someone to be attracted to Trump because of his racist attitudes and also attracted to Barack Obama, but it wasn’t impossible at all. This is because race was only one factor among many in how people made their decisions. For some, Obama’s race wasn’t a plus but it also wasn’t a dealbreaker. Maybe Hillary Clinton’s gender was the dealbreaker. Maybe they became convinced that Clinton was personally corrupt and were concerned that she was under FBI investigation, which were things they never worried about with Barack Obama. Maybe it feels different when your community is roughly split in who they’re supporting, but it becomes a more courageous act to support the Democrat when eighty percent of your neighbors are supporting the Republican. Maybe some people just vote against the incumbent party every single time.

What I think is important is to not exaggerate what happened and to write off whole sections of the country as beyond reach or hope. We get bogged down in trying to figure out if people voted for Trump because they’re irredeemably retrograde in their social attitudes or because their communities have been left behind, particularly in the post-Great Recession economy. If these communities had voted for Clinton at anything close to the rate they voted for Obama, she would have won a giant victory because she actually took suburban votes away from the Republicans. In the Philly suburbs, for example, she came away with 65,000 more net votes in the bank than Obama had, and she started out with a statewide cushion to begin with. She still lost.

What we need to understand is how to win enough Obama-Trump voters back, and that might not be the exact same thing as understanding why they abandoned us.

Nancy identified one clue when she quoted Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, to explore the power of nostalgia:

Trump’s campaign—with its sweeping promise to “make American great again”—triumphed by converting self-described “values voters” into what I’ve called “nostalgia voters.” Trump’s promise to restore a mythical past golden age—where factory jobs paid the bills and white Protestant churches were the dominant cultural hubs—powerfully tapped evangelical anxieties about an uncertain future.

We need to be mindful of two things. The first is the power of these appeals to nostalgia and the second is the fact that not all nostalgia is illegitimate. I believe that the left can do better by developing a competing nostalgia than they can by writing off the entire sentiment as morally unacceptable.

I don’t think I was fully conscious of the nostalgia element while I was writing my piece How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values, but I was grasping for a way to meet this longing for a bygone America in a way that would combine political effectiveness, good policy, and actual benefit to these afflicted communities without at the same time succumbing to or accommodating their worst instincts or characteristics.

Wanting racial segregation back is not a legitimate form of nostalgia. Wanting women out of the boardroom and elected office is not legitimate. Putting gays and lesbians back in the closet is not legitimate. Eliminating the Department of Education and the EPA is not legitimate. What’s legitimate is wanting your small town to have small businesses back. It’s not unreasonable to want it to be possible for your kids to settle nearby to you and have opportunities to prosper. In the simplest formula, people would like their kids to have to the same or better opportunities that they had, and to have them in the same place.

This is why I identified anti-monopoly and antitrust enforcement as the direction the Democrats need to go. We can’t rebuild these communities by bringing back heavy industry, but we can restore their ability to compete as small businesspeople.

How would this sound on the campaign trail?

Well, I’ll give you two examples.

The first is from 1912. It’s Woodrow Wilson campaigning in Lincoln, Nebraska:

“Which do you want? Do you want to live in a town patronized by some great combination of capitalists who pick it out as a suitable place to plant their industry and draw you into their employment? Or do you want to see your sons and your brothers and your husbands build up business for themselves under the protection of laws which make it impossible for any giant, however big, to crush them and put them out of business, so that they can match their wits here, in the midst of a free country with any captain of industry or merchant of finance … anywhere in the world?”

The second is from 1952. It’s Hubert Humphrey speaking from the Senate floor:

“We are talking about the kind of America we want.… Do we want an America where the economic marketplace is filled with a few Frankensteins and giants? Or do we want an America where there are thousands upon thousands of small entrepreneurs, independent businessmen, and landholders who can stand on their own feet and talk back to their government or to anyone else?”

I have a longstanding habit of mocking the columns of David Brooks, but he manages to provide a useful supplement to this conversation in his column today. His theory is that a lot of Trump country was once on the frontier, and the legacy from that is that people value self-reliance even when their circumstances actually call for accepting some help. As long as we don’t take that observation too far, we can use it to understand that a lot of the more culturally conservative places in America will respond better to a message (and ultimately policies, too) that is directed at their aspirations to be self-reliant again. We can give them subsidies to get health care. We can make sure their kids get enough nutrition. We can offer them free college. But what they want more than assistance is a chance to compete again. And we can offer that.

We can offer that without making concessions on civil rights or pretending we agree with them on social issues. In fact, the alternatives seem to me to be either giving up on them and their communities altogether (which means empowering their worst elements and our political opponents) or conceding on these things and asking them to vote for the lower calorie version of what they actually prefer.

For further reading on this, see Barry Lynn’s The Democrats Must Become the Party of Freedom and Paul Glastris’s Hillary Clinton Finally Takes On Corporate Monopolists.