Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong.

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

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

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

Yeah, that makes sense.

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

Then what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then what?

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

-Cardi B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your tax dollars at work, liberals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans aren’t the biggest gang.

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

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

I want to focus on happier subjects in the near future – for instance, I am planning a review of at least one role-playing game – but I did want to sweep over the latest catastrophes with Donald Trump.

The mainstream press is reporting that Trump is acting more belligerent towards the Mueller investigation because, after losing moderate insiders like Hope Hicks, he’s decided to “trust his gut instinct.” But look, Donald Trump is president. He’s gotten this far on trusting his gut instincts. Let’s face it, he’s got a huge gut.

But not only has Trump referred to Robert Mueller by name in Twit for the first time,  he decided to fire Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe (who was Jim Comey’s acting replacement) just two days before his retirement. It has been alleged that the firing was justified because of a “lack of candor”, specifically in McCabe saying that he had authority to share information with the media, approved by “the director” (Comey), and that this contradicted Comey’s direct testimony under oath when he denied authorizing anonymous leaks to the media. However, McCabe didn’t say this until his official statement after being fired, and even if this is the legal justification for “lack of candor”, the Administration could have fired McCabe at any time for other reasons. The fact that McCabe was fired just two days before being eligible for retirement – when Trump complained about that retirement benefit three months beforehand – only proves that Trump had this done because he could, really.

Likewise Trump could fire Mueller or Attorney General Sessions at any time just because, but that would be ridiculously stupid. As in, even more so than he usually is.

The factors on this are explained in a pretty good article in Vox from Monday. It is technically more complicated to fire Mueller than McCabe (because he’s the assigned special counsel) but Trump can at least fire Sessions, in order to fire Assistant AG Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller. Allegedly this would require “good cause” but it’s not like he needed it with McCabe. The real problems are that even if Trump got rid of Mueller, or hampered his probe, it wouldn’t stop the separate grand juries that have already been convened. Moreover, a shutdown of the probe would only encourage more leaks of what has been discovered, given that there would no longer be a point in concealing them: “Mueller’s probe has been remarkably leak-proof so far. Should the probe be shut down in what looks like a corrupt manner, it seems unlikely that would continue to be the case. At least some law enforcement officials would likely prove more willing to take the legal risks for leaking, should they feel it’s the only way to prevent a cover-up. And of course, the leaks after Comey’s firing were eventually followed by Mueller’s appointment. ”

As I’ve said, I am getting a bit tired of going over the obvious with our political situation, which is not only that Donald Trump is an evil moron who should not be president, but that the longer the ruling party refuses to admit this, the more legal responsibility falls on them for his crimes. Nothing will be done about this until the midterms, and given Democratic fecklessness, it remains to be seen how well they can capitalize on public anger. Nor is it necessarily a good idea for Democrats to make Russiagate a campaign focus for 2018, because that puts the focus on them. But Republicans have been gambling that they can get the “good stuff” by conservative standards (tax cuts, Supreme Court nominations) without the myriad liabilities of Donald Trump. The problem for them is not that Democrats will make Trump the focus of the election, but that Trump is making Trump the focus of the election. Of course the real problem is that Republicans cling to this goon as desperately as they can because he’s the most popular politician they have.

But in terms of not making Trump the issue, today was a particularly bad day. This week he decided to charge Stormy Daniels with violating her non-disclosure agreement, and seeks to charge her 20 million dollars – 1 million for each alleged violation. Today, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that she passed a polygraph test on the matter. Elsewhere, Trump got “benchslapped” in court when a Manhattan judge ruled that Trump had to face a defamation lawsuit brought by Summer Zevros over actions occurring while she appeared on The Apprentice with Trump. And also today, former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal opened up her own lawsuit to kill her non-disclosure agreement, on the grounds that her own attorney at the time had conspired with Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, to buy her silence on the pretext of buying magazine articles from her that were never published.

That sound of running water isn’t a dripping faucet, it’s a crack in the dam.

But friends and I were discussing this case on Facebook, and it did inspire me to make an observation on another point. Many of us – socialists, libertarians, and others who realize that machines will make unskilled labor near-obsolete – have been trying to find some way to make universal basic income possible. I have just figured out how to make universal basic income possible WITHOUT raising taxes OR cutting government services.

Because Donald Trump’s legal case hinges on him NOT having had sex with Stormy Daniels, because he paid her $130,000 to NOT say he had sex with her, and because only three people (the wives that he’s had children with) can be legally established as having sex with Donald Trump, therefore everyone else in the country is eligible to collect $130,000 from Donald Trump.

Excuse me, not Donald Trump. His lawyer.

Yeah, his lawyer.

Sure.

 

 

A few days ago, I saw this Facebook post from a right-wing troll site – I think it was “The Federalist Papers” – saying, “Notice how GUNS have stolen the attention from Clinton/Obama rigging the election?”

It raises another question in turn: Notice how Trumpniks want to complain about an election they won when the consequences of their vote start to bite them in the ass?

Last week, Viceroy Trump did at least two things to tweak his conservative backers. In another bipartisan conference with Republican and Democratic politicians, this time over gun violence, Trump once again went off script. Not only did he entertain gun legislation that Republicans have done their best to stop, he went that much further than Dianne Feinstein, saying that legal process in the case of the Florida shooter would have taken too long. “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

Conservatives warned me, if I didn’t vote for Trump, the government would try to take away our guns. And they were right!

And then at the end of the week, Trump announced (without conferring with most of his cabinet) that he was enacting tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. Well, that is certainly the strategy of a stable genius. After all, one wouldn’t otherwise disregard the advice of the entire financial community and one’s own party if he were a raging ignoramus with the attention span of a squirrel on meth, would he?

There is some rationale for a protectionist policy, given that we have a national security interest in rebuilding the domestic steel industry – China is our main supplier, but they may not remain friendly to us. Moreover, Trump knows he got elected largely because of blue-collar steel country, and he knows his party has suddenly become very vulnerable in the Pennsylvania special election. But would Trump endanger so much on the large scale just to prop up support among a small part of the base? Well, it’s what he’s done so far. It’s of a piece with arming teachers, or supporting health insurance policies that cross state lines; some of his ideas seem both unconventional and reasonable, but it quickly becomes clear that he hasn’t thought through the implications of his words, and he’s just casting about to see what people want to hear.

In any case, Trump did such a bad job of reading the room that his own people are going against him. On Monday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said, “We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan said in a statement. “The new tax reform law has boosted the economy and we certainly don’t want to jeopardize those gains.” Meanwhile, Trump’s sudden anti-gun posture, blaming video games for our violent culture, is even alienating some of the alt-right “Gamergate” types who were the first to support him. A Vox article shows the responses on a Reddit board:  “I don’t even know what the fuck he’s even doing at this point.” “Obvious conservative virtue signaling… Also a reminder that the enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend.”

Well, I coulda told you that.

Wow, Trumpniks. It’s almost as if whoring yourselves out to the most disgusting creature imaginable just to get the White House back wasn’t such a bargain after all.

This is what happens when you sleep with grunting pigs in the midden. You wake up with fecal matter and trichinosis.

Oh, if only somebody had warned you. And by somebody, I mean GODDAMN FUCKING EVERYBODY.

It gets to how, over and over again, I have pondered why Trump would keep saying “we’re going to build a wall, and Mexico is gonna pay for it”, and people would actually believe him. Now he’s willing to hold up a budget because we won’t pay Mexico’s bill on border security, and the cult still believes it. And I realized that belief isn’t really the point here. It’s telling people a lie that makes them feel better. It doesn’t matter if it can actually be achieved. The goal is the myth (as Mussolini would put it). It’s gotten to where it’s a “greatest hits” moment at Trump rallies, a call and response where Trump goes “we’re gonna build a wall, and…” the audience yells “MEXICO WILL PAY FOR IT!”

The call and response should really be:

“I’m going to fuck you up the ass, and…”
“YOUR DICK IS WRAPPED IN SANDPAPER!”
“Better believe it.”

All they want to do is vent. They support a certain party in power because it tells them what they want to hear, and because they want to be on the side that’s winning, even if that party is fucking them up the ass. After all, that’s what they expect government to do anyway, but at least they’re getting fucked by their “team.”

This is the problem with the Rod Drehers and Pat Buchanans of the world who cluck that the world is going to Hell (perhaps literally) because no one practices religion, morals and discipline, but think the country should be run by the most worldly, immoral and downright LAZY politician in our history. Hey guys: Unlike you, I like Andrew Dice Clay. As a comedian. But unlike you, I don’t think he should be the president.

The other aspect of this, and here I think Rod Dreher would agree with me, is that we worship government as God, or more specifically we put government in the same place in the social order that we had placed God before the Age of Enlightenment. But this is why the conservative model of government is doomed to fail. That model is that the moral arbiters of American life will take control of government and guide the people to righteousness. What happens (especially now) is that a certain unscrupulous faction will take over government, and because the moral arbiters worship government as government, they mold their morality to the people in power rather than the other way around.

It would seem, given the secularism of the Left and the outright deification of the State by Leninists, that state-worship is a Left problem that only the Right opposes, but it may be that the worship of government as God – or the representation of God on Earth – is the conservative goal. After all, the common point separating government before the Enlightenment from government afterward is the concept of separating church and state. The union of Church and State was the pre-liberal standard of government. It goes back to a concept commonly expressed in Latin: Cuius regio, eius religio (whose region, his religion).  When a ruler chose to convert to Christianity (or convert to Protestantism), his kingdom officially followed suit. It was by this principle that missionaries did more than soldiers to convert the barbarians of Europe in the Dark Ages, but it was also by this principle that Europe had the Thirty Years War and most of its bloodletting before the French Revolution. Whereas the opposite principle, the separation of church and state, is the reason that Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants are able to coexist in New York City (and other American communities) without killing each other. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that this principle is why Americans are generally more religious than modern Europeans, because in our tradition, religion is a matter of conscience, not a chore or a political affiliation.

If Americans treat government as God, then libertarians are government-atheist, or at the most accommodating, government-skeptic. By this analogy, that would make Democrats government-Catholic and Republicans government-Torquemada.

As far as where all this is going, and what it means for the Republican Party to turn itself into the Party of Trump, I direct the reader to a must-see article in The New Yorker about former MI6 spy and current intelligence analyst for hire Christopher Steele. There is much that has already been said with regard to Steele, Paul Manafort and other aspects of the overall Trump investigation. But in the article, there are points to emphasize:

Steele had not started investigating Trump solely because the Clinton campaign hired him. Some of his investigations were years prior, including the corruption investigations against FIFA (the international soccer association). There was a suspicion that Russia had won its World Cup bid due to bribes, and it turned out that one of the figures being indicted for this (by the US Justice Department) was Chuck Blazer, a FIFA official who had a high-class apartment in Trump Tower. After this, the FBI hired Steele’s company to help investigate a money-laundering ring being run by a Russian national out of Trump Tower. And in 2016, Steele’s company was first hired to get opposition research on Trump by Paul Singer, an anti-Trump Republican who gave up the project once Trump secured the Republican nomination. It was only after that point that Fusion GPS, a company hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign, took up the investigation and asked Steele to collaborate. It was only after Steele compiled the information in “the dossier” that he started to agitate for his contacts to work against Trump. Far from trying to conjure a narrative out of coincidental facts, Steele almost didn’t see the big picture because it didn’t occur to him.

While some of the more credible Trump-friendly experts, like Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, or writer David Garrow, had cause to question Christopher Steele’s motives, a former National Security Council employee told The New Yorker that “if Steele had not shared his findings (with the FBI), he might have been accused of dereliction or a coverup.” Contrary to the positions of (say) Devin Nunes, Steele and Fusion did not actually tell the Clinton campaign that Steele had gone to the FBI. A top Clinton-campaign person told the reporter, “If I’d known the F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the rooftops!”

And on that score, the Barack Obama Administration, which obviously supported Clinton, was at pains to avoid tipping the scale, mainly because of the Hatch Act which forbids government employees to use their position to influence coming elections. But it was also because Trump and the Republicans had heated up the public discussion and introduced the idea that the election would be illegitimate if he lost, even if it were due to opposition research. By August 2016, the Administration had already been informed by the CIA that Vladimir Putin was interfering in the election on behalf of Trump. In early September, Obama tried to get leaders of both parties to issue a bipartisan statement against Russia’s meddling. “He reasoned that if both parties signed on the statement couldn’t be attacked as political.” By this time Congressional leaders had also been informed of the intelligence. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to sign on to the statement. Without that bipartisan endorsement, Obama said nothing about what he knew before the election.

So no matter how much Trump whines that Obama never did anything about Russia, that is the reason why he didn’t. And both Trump and McConnell know this.

One does not do so much to cover up evidence when there’s nothing to cover up. After all, Hillary Clinton proved to be famously inept at concealing information, and yet a Republican-controlled Congress found it impossible to confirm criminal action when she was Secretary of State during the Benghazi disaster. The fact that the same Congress is going to such lengths to stop any investigation of Donald Trump’s Russia connection, or possibly related matters, like his tax returns, means that they have cause to suspect they know much more is going on. And the issue thus becomes less the Trump family’s culpability than the Republican Party’s culpability. If it seems odd that such an avowedly patriotic party would go so far against the government to defend a leader who is associated with both the Russians and organized crime in general, it’s because their whole concept of “patriotism” is based on Führerprinzip and an authoritarian, anti-liberal principle of government. And if someone presented the most blatant, lid-tight legal case that their Dear Leader was compromised by an even more crooked Russian autocrat, they would probably love him more, because he represents their inner spirit more than liberalism, libertarianism or the political “establishment.”

I am a bit tired of going over the obvious with how screwed up modern conservatism is, but if my theory is correct, the whole system is dysfunctional. Certainly, Democrats are not as crazed and power-hungry as Republicans, but then they haven’t been in the wilderness as long, and moreover, they are still under the impression that the system is built on their political premises.

And in this regard, I would like to make a request.

This Saturday in Las Vegas, I attended the Libertarian Party of Nevada convention for 2018, where we nominated candidates for Senate and US Congress. It was a good event. I think we had enough people to fill a punk rock bar this year. Anyway, the spokesman went over party activity for the previous year and noted that we have reached a point in membership where we are just 28 registered voters short of 1 percent of state voter rolls, where 1 percent would automatically qualify us for ballot access in the next election.

So if you are one of the maybe five people who read this blog, I ask you to consider registering as a Libertarian. I consider this a valid goal in itself, but there is also a practical consideration. If you are to the right of Hillary Clinton, you are going to need a political party to represent your positions in the next few elections, given that the current “official” right-wing party is in danger of having most of its leadership indicted for obstruction of justice.

Did I watch the State of the Union live? Nah. If I was going to waste time watching a badly-staged, insincere show of virtue that only confirmed the opposite, I would’ve watched the Grammy Awards.

But of course the main story leading up to this weekend was #ReleaseTheMemo, in which Republicans were huffing and puffing about the scandal of a biased FBI investigation against Trump, and Democrats were huffing and puffing that the release of FBI decisions was a threat to national security.

The effort was part of a somewhat successful campaign to put the prosecution on trial in the court of public opinion. (Hey, it worked for O.J. Simpson!) But it turned out to be much ado about nothing, for both sides. In terms of national security, the memo didn’t reveal much that we didn’t know. As the memo was analyzed, journalists realized that it relied on a presentation of Carter Page being targeted for his association with the Trump campaign (when it turned out that the FBI was looking at him before Trump even ran for president) and the idea that the Robert Mueller investigation is based entirely on the “Steele dossier” (when it turns out that there is at least one more dossier, and investigations proceeded mainly on suspicion of Trump advisor George Papadopoulos).

All this fails to explain why the whole investigation must be thrown out as “fruit of the poison tree” solely on the grounds of anti-Trump sympathy on the part of some players, but that demand is not automatically invalidated on the grounds that it is justified solely on pro-Trump sentiment. As Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the right-wing Cato Institute put it,  “Honestly, this reads like something you’d put together to *sound* scandalous to someone who isn’t going to parse it closely. ”

Oh gee. I wonder who that would be?

Like it matters, though. It’s of a piece with how Trump, simply by being leader of the Republicans, gets the mob to follow along as he redefines what being a Republican is. First Trump said that John McCain wasn’t a war hero. And Republicans had to go along with it. Then he said that (black) athletes were disrespecting the national anthem. And all of a sudden, Joe Sixpack started boycotting the NFL. Now Republicans are supposed to believe that the FBI – the J. Edgar Hoover organization that is more responsible for Trump’s election victory than any Russian skullduggery – is unpatriotic and a threat to the rule of law. (‘Unpatriotic’ meaning ‘does not worship Trump’ and ‘rule of law’ meaning ‘whatever wild hair is up Trump’s ass.’)

What’s next? Who knows? I’m thinking next week, Trump is going to announce that he is female and is undergoing the process of transition, at which point all the Republicans in Congress will fall on top of each other to be the first one to get castrated on the grounds that masculinity is now “gay.”

But this dynamic gets to a more abstract discussion I had recently with a left-wing Facebook friend. He had posted an article from Quartz about how Richard Spencer and other professional racists are “targeting disgruntled white male lefties to join their movement.” For one thing, the article quotes white nationalist speaker Eli Mosley in saying: “We’ve almost literally drained the market of libertarians.” But I could have told him this. I’ve addressed that subject at length with two detailed posts. In any case, you can’t get many libertarian recruits for the same reason that libertarians have neither taken off with the Libertarian Party nor taken over the Republican Party: There just aren’t that many of us in the first place. But the article went on to mention how the rightist groups were trying to poach leftists using their own language, especially invoking the common enemy of “corporate neoliberalism”. And my friend said in his assessment of the article, “I understand a bit of how this works from back when I was a conspiracy nut. While these days I think ‘horseshoe theory’ is full of shit, from the standpoint of a poor white dude who is not particularly well educated in politics, it *appears* true. What rightwing groups do is create a common enemy and sort of set your focus in another direction. … It’s just a more subtle version of what the far right has done for a long time. Bait and switch. ”

And my first response was, “To the extent that horseshoe theory is BS, it’s because authoritarians at both ‘extremes’ have more in common with each other than they have in common with classical liberals or moderates. But then, that’s why people like me use the ‘classical’ qualifier, because it’s becoming more and more clear that the Left never cared for real liberalism. That’s the main thing Marxists had in common with the blood-and-soil types.”

My friend responded, “I don’t think they have ‘more in common’ so much as they have *weird* things in common, which stick out to moderates. I mean, obviously any group that considers the status quo in need of immediate overhaul is going to have that in common. Any group that thinks the government is illegitimate will hold that in common.
“But those don’t define the left or right as much as they do extremism in general. If there were true ‘radical centrists’ that were actually uncomfortable with the status quo, they would have these traits. But the statement that radical groups are radical is never as profound as it seems to those who just discover it. It doesn’t change that the goals of the extreme left and right are opposite, and their policy preferences are irreconcilable.”

This was a topic I wanted to go over in light of my prior observations.

I have read that the problem with “horseshoe theory” is not merely that it oversimplifies politics to say that each political wing becomes more alike as they become more extreme, but that it discounts the fundamental differences between Right and Left in their motivations and goals. But if moderates fail to grasp the real political differences between two extremes, those differences likewise seem immaterial if you are a victim of extremism. It doesn’t matter to me whether I get thrown in the concentration camp because I’m gay, or Jewish, or atheist, or Muslim, or just because I didn’t follow whatever the fashion of political correctness was last week. The result will be the same.

As an example, a lot of leftists will excuse the Cuban government under Fidel Castro on the grounds that they created free education and health care. To me, “free education and health care” strikes me as the Left’s version of “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time.” And I say this because social democracies in Europe managed to develop support systems and health care without also putting gays and religious dissenters in prison. Apologists for the Castros will tell us that the Cuban regime militarized largely to defend against the hostility of the United States and its boycott of the island. But in response to that embargo, Cuba became an economic part of the Soviet bloc, and when the USSR ended, opened trade relations with wealthy Western nations that ignored the embargo. Leftists will also say that Cuba was a small, poor Latin American country with no resources to develop itself without socialism. But Costa Rica is a Latin American country with less natural resources, and it had both universal health care and a multiparty democracy in the 1940s. If the motivations of leftism are to give power to the people and create a more equitable standard of living, liberal and left-socialist governments have done so in several cases without becoming Cuban or Soviet-style regimes. But if you want to put gays and religious people in prison, then Cuba is not a failure but a success.

This is the practical reason why we should not use the ends to justify the means, because ultimately the means are ends in themselves.

Now for a more relevant example: It was reported last month that the Koch brothers are going to spend 400 million dollars on the 2018 midterms to preserve the Republicans’ majority in both houses of Congress. Previously they had spent $20 million in 2017 to run media campaigns and support efforts to pass the tax bill. In the CNBC article on the Kochs’ support network, it was also mentioned that they sponsor efforts at prison reform and also supports Trump’s recently announced idea of creating a path to citizenship for Dreamers while also opposing their drive to end chain migration for families. In the past, the Koch family were instrumental in the development of the Libertarian Party (David Koch ran as the running mate of Ed Clark in 1980) and also helped found the Cato Institute. Several of their positions (in support of immigrants, criminal justice reform and civil liberties, for instance) are worth supporting in themselves but are at odds with the positions of most Republicans. However Koch Industries is still based in fossil fuel production and the Koch network is actively against not only climate change legislation but any attempts by government or private enterprise to create energy alternatives.  Moreover, for the sake of specific goals that coincide with libertarianism, the Kochs give monetary and other support to conservative groups with questionable goals, for example contributing to the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has sponsored voter ID laws in several states to restrict voting. This would be one thing if the agenda was simply economic libertarianism or Paul Ryan-style fiscal policy (which liberals would hate in any case). But as the vehicle of the Republican Party becomes more and more enslaved to the whims of Donald Trump, whatever social or even economic libertarianism could be achieved through conservatism will be undermined by the much broader movement towards authoritarianism. Given that the Kochs, unlike most Republicans, know enough about the Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement to know the difference between libertarianism and conservatism, they had the choice to use their wealth and influence to organize and grow a party that could challenge a problematic conservatism. The fact that they do not indicates that instead of trying to replace a dysfunctional system, they would rather maintain that system in order to serve their short-term purposes.

In the last election, right-wingers had a choice: vote for Trump (which the majority did), vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson (which I did) or vote for Hillary Clinton (which a lot of NeverTrumpers, even Penn Jillette, did). Each choice implied different value judgments and bargains as to what package deal was acceptable in politics. If for instance you seriously believe that personhood begins at conception and therefore abortion is always murder, you will find it almost impossible to deal with the Democratic Party or even the Libertarian Party. But if you align with the Republicans, you now know that you are supporting people who place cult of personality above the rule of law.

And from the left-wing perspective, being “pro-choice” and pro-woman often means putting yourself in contradictory positions, for instance taking money from Harvey Weinstein for Democratic campaigns.

In judging political alignments, that is, what party or general platform an individual chooses, the tendency seems to be that people fixate on a few issues (like abortion, or taxes) and adjust all their other positions around them. At that point, political actions are simply a matter of what one is willing to do and how far one will justify the overall goal. This might not be done for the sake of an extreme position, but it is possible to be led into extremism for the sake of the position. In this country at least, that usually occurs because of negative motivations and a desire to stop the opposing faction rather than promote a favored one. If there is one thing that extremists of both Left and Right have in common, it is not a vision of society but a hatred of “bourgeois” moderate liberalism and the process of negotiation in a representative democracy. This may be why the racists in the Quartz article had reason to think that by bagging on neoliberalism and capitalists that they could get recruits from the Left who would otherwise have nothing in common with them. After all, historically they’d done it before.

So in reviewing horseshoe theory, I think it’s fairly clear that the two political wings can both end in authoritarianism, regardless of apparent first motives. However, horseshoe theory doesn’t strictly apply in the current case, because it doesn’t explain why the slide to authoritarianism happens in the current context.

I again return to the point that “polarization”, at least in America, doesn’t work the way it does according to conventional wisdom. The process in our two-party system has been that years before Trump, the Tea Party and other factors purified the Republican Party of “RINOs” and even serious conservatives (like Utah’s Bob Bennett) because they weren’t following the conservative version of political correctness. Trump is simply the culmination of this. The result was that in a two-party system, people kicked out of one party normally go to the other one (the Democrats) even when that really isn’t a good fit for them. The long-term result was a dilution of whatever appeal Democrats had to the hard left and working class, and increased the perception among people like the Clintons that “neoliberal” friendliness to the elites was the way to go, if for no other reason than that it got them campaign money. As a tangential point, I bring up my theory that this is why the “stuff your principles and vote for the lesser evil” attitude, promoted by the Democrats most of the time but especially in 2016, was counterproductive and actually played into Trump’s hands. Because a lot of the moderates and NeverTrump right-wingers (like myself) had quit the Republicans precisely because we rejected that binary logic, and apparently so did a lot of left-wingers. The kind of people who did embrace binary logic were the kind of people who stuffed their qualms and decided to vote for Trump. The Republicans have gambled on having fewer but more committed voters whereas the Democrats have a theoretically larger voter base but fewer actual votes when it counts. And as we see, the gamble has paid off, not so much in presidential races (until now) but in state and down-ballot races that gave Republicans their legislative majorities, which magnify the effects of a Republican presidency and stymie the goals of a Democratic one.

The problem is less the differences between Left and Right and more a matter of what approach the political environment rewards.

This means that the other point is that it doesn’t matter so much whether a party is “extreme.” If you’re not going to uphold standards when the president is not a tyrant, and his party is moderate, you can’t expect standards to be upheld when the Leader is thoroughly crooked, his party is openly authoritarian, and their emotional and political investment in him is that much deeper. Which to me means that the cause of our current political moment is not to get this country back to “normal.” Because the prior normal sucked, the normal was dysfunctional, the normal is what got us to this point, and the goal must be to get us to something better than the previous norm.