James Gillen

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it. “

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I had intended to address a certain article a couple of weeks ago, but it is amazing that in that time, it has actually become more relevant. On June 8, Andrew Sullivan had his weekly column in New York Magazine, discussing the Trump Administration policy of separating migrant families at the border, which he actually referred to as “state terror”, just before Samantha Bee blew things up with her comments on the subject, which was just before the whole thing metastasized this week.

Because while the first part of the column addressed the evil psychology of the Trump Administration, the second part of the column moved to a different subject that Sullivan didn’t seem to think was related. The same week, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, where the Court under Anthony Kennedy ruled for the plaintiff against Colorado, on the grounds that the opinion of the Civil Rights Commission in the original case constituted prejudice towards the baker. Sullivan referred to this quote by Kennedy:
“To describe a man’s faith as ‘one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use’ is to disparage his religion in at least two distinct ways: by describing it as despicable, and also by characterizing it as merely rhetorical — something insubstantial and even insincere.” Sullivan says, “a growing number of people, many of them exactly kind of person who sits on a civil-rights commission in a blue state, do actually and sincerely feel contempt for religion and religious belief. … When it comes to full-on fundamentalists, the capacity for some scrap of mutual understanding is increasingly remote. The more distant you are — socially, geographically, generationally, culturally — from anyone who practices religion in any serious way, the harder it is to empathize, and to see these cases as a conflict at all. It simply seems incredible that someone would hold these views faithfully. ”

The thing is, while a lot of coast people in blue states might not live next door to folks who practice religion “in a serious way”, their main exposure to fundamentalists and other “serious” believers is through their increasing attempts to influence the political sphere, which have become that much more obvious as the Evangelical community and Donald Trump have embraced each other. Such politicized religion may or may not be insincere or insubstantial, but it is definitely wielded with rhetorical purpose, and the results are often despicable.

For example, it was a bit of a surprise when evangelist Franklin Graham spoke out last week against the government’s child caging policy.  I say it’s a surprise given his past history. In 2015, Graham got on Facebook to say:  “Listen up–Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and everybody else. Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience.” This got a negative response from many, including liberal Christians.  Previously, Graham had broadly endorsed the Trump Administration, agreeing that Muslims should be “vetted” before being allowed to enter the United States. In 2010, Graham talked about Barack Obama, telling CNN “”I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim; his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.”

With regard to “respect for authority and obedience,” this sentiment was reflected recently in the position of the Trump Administration, in a statement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who approved the official family separation policy at the border. As part of a public statement, Sessions told the press, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” he said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

The text in question is (King James Version):

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:

For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”

It’s sort of like the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, where the existence of a dynasty was proof that it was favored by God (or the celestial hierarchy) and if a government fell, that was proof that the Emperor had lost his Mandate. Of course, the problem with such a theory in either case is that it is only “proven” after the fact.

But it’s one thing to go back to the context of an evangelist in Rome, speaking to Christians in Rome and counseling them how to live as a minority under a hostile government. But for a high government official to quote this passage to say we should obey the government is a too-convenient support of ulterior motives, much as it would be if the new Surgeon General told us that smoking is good for you even though he’s simultaneously the CEO of RJ Reynolds. This being the Trump Administration, I expect that scenario to play out over the next three months.

In his latest column, Sullivan actually says that the only way to end what two weeks ago he referred to as “state terror” is to just give Trump his border wall, which strikes me as giving in to the hostage taker after he’s lowered his gun. Not only is the wall (and the child caging) a wasteful boondoggle by fiscal conservative standards,  by Sullivan’s own admission, neither of the two parties is organized enough to pass any bill on the subject. Recall that earlier this year, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi endorsed a plan to have a DACA bill that included funding for a wall, and Trump shot it down. And Sullivan says “what I’m proposing here is something bigger.” You never negotiate with a terrorist, particularly one who is less mentally stable than Heath Ledger’s Joker.
In Sullivan’s take, “Democrats need to accept that they lost the last presidential election for a reason, and that their opponent’s main campaign pledge was to tackle illegal immigration, with a wall at the southern border as the centerpiece. ” Uh, no. Granted, being anti-immigrant was a big part of the Trump appeal, but we know that the Republicans were no less nativist when a half-African president was running for re-election. To say that Trump had a central campaign pledge is to say that the campaign had a central premise besides Fuck Hillary and Make Liberals Cry. The Democrats lost because when they nominated Hillary Clinton, they sent a clear signal that they didn’t care about flyover country, or people “of color” or even women. But let us not forget (as if liberals will let you) that Clinton still won more votes than Trump. That implies that her voter base would have been that much stronger if she’d been, y’know, competent.

Because while the long-term problem is that neither of the two “real” parties has serious leadership or ideas, the short-term problem and immediate threat is that the “conservative” party is actively destructive to ideas, and to the political system, and to social norms. And it’s the social norms that conservatives are supposed to care about.
Earlier this year, there was a Politico article where the author compared Franklin Graham’s ministry to that of his famous father Billy Graham, and said that in comparison to his father,

“Franklin Graham seems blissfully unaware of the possibility that there might be even the slimmest of gaps between the words that come out of his mouth and the words written down in scripture. More damningly, he demonstrates no awareness of the ways in which his political pronouncements are breaking down the evangelical witness his father devoted so much energy to building up. … The most significant development in American religion in recent years is the shocking rise of the religiously unaffiliated (otherwise known as “nones”), who now account for roughly one quarter of all Americans. This increasing distance from religious institutions is accompanied by increasing distance from religious beliefs and practices. Today 27 percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and another 18 percent as “neither religious nor spiritual.” There are many reasons for this decline in religious believing and belonging. But the most important in my view is the increasing identification of the Christian churches with right-wing politics. If you are among the 26 percent of eligible voters who voted for Trump, you likely applaud this development. But what about the other 74 percent? “

And I bring up Graham because, in his willingness to break with Trump in even one particular, he’s one of the better preachers. As opposed to the other prominent evangelicals who’ve said that Trump deserves a “mulligan” over his adulterous history.

And then there’s this:

PAHRUMP, Nev. (Reuters) – He styles himself as America’s best-known pimp, a strip-club owner who runs multiple brothels and looks set to win a seat as a Republican in the Nevada legislature with the blessing of many conservative Christian voters.
Meet Dennis Hof, whose political rise reflects fundamental changes in electoral norms that have roiled the Republican Party and upended American politics during the era of President Donald Trump.

“This really is the Trump movement,” Hof, 71, told Reuters in an interview at Moonlite BunnyRanch, his brothel near Carson City in northern Nevada that was featured on the HBO reality television series “Cathouse.”
“People will set aside for a moment their moral beliefs, their religious beliefs, to get somebody that is honest in office,” he said. “Trump is the trailblazer, he is the Christopher Columbus of honest politics.”

Because if you can’t trust a Nevada pimp and a four-time bankrupt Jersey casino boss, who can you trust?

If you’re a Republican and you actually care about immigration – and I may be presumptuous in assuming that – you have at least two choices. Do you want to create a serious guest worker program to handle those people whose reasons for emigrating are purely economic, do what Ted Cruz says and expand the court system to handle asylum cases and then toughen admission requirements once the bureaucracy actually has the manpower and facilities to handle the workload? OR, do you want to demonize migrants, change the goalposts on admission, tell them that they can only apply at official points of entry and then have the POEs say they’re too full to process, wait for the migrants to show up on the border to get arrested, make a big deal of separating the families and then put little cups in front of liberals so you can drink their tears?

Well, one course might be a long-term solution to the problem, but I know which course will make Trump and the little Trumpniks feel better about themselves.

I saw somebody on Facebook comment about this: “It is much worse than that. They’re doing it with the full knowledge of how vile it is, because they know that they can stomach it better than their political opponents can and so they think if they do it and tell them that they won’t stop unless they get their way that they’ll win.”

Again we see the classic psychology of the bully: using your own morality as a weapon against you so that they can gleefully defile it.

Of course this only applies to the extent that force and fear actually work. At a certain point, people become so sick of evil that they no longer fear reprisal. And with enough numbers on their side, even force may not be enough to stop them. The end result is that the thugs’ philosophy is completely discredited once force (government) is no longer on their side.

In regard to the immigration issue, it’s worth looking at a little clip from the days of Saint Reagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok where in 1980 during a primary debate someone raised the question to George H.W. Bush (later Reagan’s vice president) as to whether illegal immigrants should get to attend the University of Texas. Note that while Bush is not exactly articulate, he is still more so than pretty much anybody in the 2016 campaign, including the Democrats. Note also that while he doesn’t want illegal immigration to continue he thinks that immigrants have the same rights as everyone else. He actually calls them “honorable, decent people” who just happen to be in violation of a law that can be changed. Then note that Ronald Reagan, whom liberals loved to ridicule as an anti-intellectual, actually uses words like “we haven’t been sensitive enough to our size and our power” in relation to Mexico. And he is also able to articulate a practical, long-term value in creating a long-term work program as a “safety valve” for Mexico that would work better than “building a fence”.

I remember when Republicans talked like that. Do modern Republicans? I guess not. That’s one reason I’m not one anymore.

See, back in the old days, I remember when Republicans didn’t need gerrymandering and voter ID laws to win elections. Instead they found well-spoken, morally forthright candidates who could present reasonable ideas to the majority and get their party elected. But I guess that’s just too hard now. When you see that clip in relation to the Republican Party now, even tied as it was to “the Moral Majority,” it’s a difference of night and day. The decline in political standards – ultimately a decline in intellectual standards – reflects the decline of moral standards.

Nowadays Jerry Falwell Jr. and the other heirs of the Moral Majority tie themselves ever more tightly to the Republican Party even as its secular politics and their religious positions both become isolated from the mainstream of American thought. And the Good Christians tell themselves that they tie themselves to the Republicans because their morality is under siege from the secular Left. And they never consider that the reason for their isolation is because of the deal they made for political power. The dynamic is a vicious cycle in which each side of the political-religious complex festers in persecution complex and revenge fantasy, reacting not with Reagan’s “Morning in America” but Trump’s “American Carnage.” They claim to speak for the “real” America as Nixon spoke for the Silent Majority, when even a lot of white and right-wing people are not really on board. Their declaration of their own correctness is betrayed by their insistence on having everything their way and having the whole process of legislation controlled by them with no Democratic input whatsoever. If you can only get your way by chicanery and force you are projecting your own sense that your ideas would not survive debate. In the old days, Reagan, Goldwater and William F. Buckley knew that they were starting from an unpopular position, so they thought the goal was to make their ideas popular. Not anymore. Nowadays there isn’t even an intention of appealing to a majority of voters, but since the first-past-the-post election system doesn’t work like basic cable niche programming, Republicans have to engineer the voter base they want through their primary system. And now that the incentive of the Republican Party is to nominate the most ridiculous idiot, doing anything that the rest of the country would agree with is just a sign that you’re a “cuck” or a sellout. The more something offends the liberal media, the more Republicans love it, even if liberals aren’t the only ones who find the Republicans evil. And the downward spiral continues until the Republican Party becomes the political equivalent of Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious or G.G. Allin, dying in its own shit just for the sake of being “authentic.”

What so-called conservatives and Good Christians don’t realize is that their vicious cycle is only bringing about the very result they claim to fear. The result of identifying morality with force and fear is to discredit what you call morality and to empower what you call its opposite.

The more that religious conservatives feel threatened by sexual minorities, the more they insist on laws against trans and gay people, and the more likely it is that the law will respond by treating them as threats to trans and gay people. The more that “free market” conservatives let the already wealthy loot the public treasury, the more people think that socialism might be a good idea. And the longer the Trump Administration insists that the only course on immigration is state terrorism towards brown people, the harder it will be politically to find an alternative that isn’t just straight amnesty for all illegal immigrants now and in the future.

The “conservative” political-religious complex insists that they act as they do to stop the Cultural Marxists from stomping all over them, but they’re the ones who are forcing the culture war with their terrible infant mentality, stomping all over the rest of us. And when somebody else forces a war on you, you don’t care if it is over a Noble Cause, you just want to defend your own and put a stop to it.

All this is why anybody on the Right who does care about the long-term concerns – culture, liberty, capitalism – can only watch in horror as our self-proclaimed defenders disgrace the cause they claim to defend. Because of them, it will be that much harder to revive that cause once they have dragged it to defeat.

This all ties into why religion is not a guarantor of morality. It comes down to the fact that “good conservative Christians” have fused their religious identity with their political identity, and their political identity has in turn been fused with the most petty, profane, spiteful and stupid creature in American political history.

Now, if you are a Good Christian, you might resent this declaration. You might resent being swept up in this broad stereotype category. But let’s face it. When Republicans send us their candidates… they’re not sending their best. They’ve got a lot of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.  They’re racists.  And some, I assume, are good people.

What you’re going to have to figure out is that you’re not the Body of Christ. Trump is Dorian Gray, and you’re his picture.

Trump can go from scandal to scandal completely unmarred, largely because the Republican Party covers for him, and that’s entirely because you, the Good Christians, love him more than any other Republican politician. But the more you enable him, the less it becomes a matter of his depravity and more a matter of yours. After all, most Americans had already seen The Apprentice and knew why it wasn’t a good idea to make Gary Busey’s dumber sidekick the guy with the nuclear launch codes. The only reason Trump is still where he is is because you want him there.

Of course, there’s a difference. In the fantasy story, Dorian Gray remained youthful and clean-looking as his picture became more and more soiled. Eventually, the truth of the portrait offended him so much he took a knife to it and he died of a heart attack. When his staff found him, his corpse was old and corrupted, but the picture was restored to its original appearance.
When Trump is gone, the corruption that you display will not go away. Because it was your corruption all along. He just made you feel comfortable in expressing it.

So maybe you think that description doesn’t apply to you. And maybe it doesn’t. Why then do you associate with those that it does apply to? Was it because Hillary was worse? Do you really think so now? In any case, she’s not running this year. Many “conservatives” tell us that the problem with liberals (‘liberal’ apparently meaning anyone who doesn’t kiss Trump’s ass) is that they hate Trump more than they love America. The accusation should be reversed: Do conservatives hate liberals more than they love America? Does the cult love Trump more than they love America? Do they love Trump more than they love God?

Because they’re going to have to make a choice soon.

The conventional wisdom (an oxymoron not quite as good as ‘military intelligence’) on Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un is that by even acknowledging Kim in the first place, Trump gave the North Korean dictator a win and a diplomatic advantage that he didn’t deserve.

I actually give Trump credit for thinking outside the box here. It is true we should not be giving thug regimes enhanced credibility, but we do not have relations with North Korea, we do not have relations with the Islamic Republic in Iran, and we do not have relations with the Castro-built regime in Cuba, and none of those countries became liberal democracies just because Uncle Sam decided to hold his breath until they did. And the withholding of America’s favor on the premise that reform will bring diplomatic benefits is not a coin that holds much value anymore. Especially these days. So if Trump’s maneuver can bring about an actual peace treaty with North Korea, when we have never had one since 1953, that would be a truly great achievement. It would deserve to be the centerpiece exhibit at the future Donald Trump Presidential Library and Adult Bookstore.

See, I’m not a liberal. My problem with Donald Trump isn’t that he’s a conservative (whatever the hell that means anymore) but that he’s an incompetent. The problem with taking the initiative to reach out to the North Korean dictatorship is not the idea itself, but the fact that this is Donald Trump, and he’s going to find SOME way to fuck it up. Just like his diplomacy with our (former) allies. Before and during the G-7, Trump claimed (with partial but exaggerated accuracy) that Canada had its own trade discrepancies with the US, and citing them, tried to bully Justin Trudeau into accepting all his demands to stop Trump’s tariff threats, and when Trudeau refused him, Trump and his toadies decided to scream and cry and carry on, and now the official position of State is that Justin Trudeau is the meanest ogre in the world. And if you’re not already a Trumpnik, that is very difficult to believe. I mean, Justin Trudeau is basically Mr. Rogers as played by Matthew McConaughey.

But in the midst of this, especially Trump’s disturbing affinity with lil’ Kim’s authoritarian regime, it raises the argument among Trump’s critics as to whether he is a fascist. And whenever I consider the matter, I always respond that Trump isn’t intellectual enough to be a fascist. That isn’t to say that he doesn’t have that temperament or that ultimately he doesn’t want to be a fascist, but Trump doesn’t even have the regard for ideas that a would-be Svengali like Steve Bannon has, and none of the big idea men who have tried to sway him have been able to control him for long, because their systematic thinking is totally opposed to his attitude.
Fascism as a discrete philosophy was developed by the Italian Marxist journalist Benito Mussolini in the wake of World War I, when he switched his political position from antiwar socialism to pro-Italian, pro-war nationalism to seize Italian-speaking territories in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Given Mussolini’s roots, and his knowledge of thinkers like Nietszche and Sorel, leftists tend to discount his intellectual background and deny that Fascism has any roots in or similarity to socialism. Yet, Fascism does have distinct characteristics. Whereas socialists frame their goals in altrustic or even utopian terms, and rationalize even violent actions along those lines, fascists define violence and domination as good in and of themselves.

Another trait of fascism (where Mussolini borrowed from Georges Sorel) is the deliberate invocation of myth and the irrational over the Marxists’ insistence that their philosophy was “scientific” socialism. This is mainly the case where fascism emphasized the nation over an international class struggle (and where the Nazis later embraced a racial myth). A myth is different from a lie, because while a myth cannot be proven, it cannot exactly be disproven, either. It doesn’t matter if the myth is “true”, what matters is what it represents. For instance, Christianity is a myth. We can’t prove Jesus was real, or that Jesus is God, but we can’t exactly disprove it, and the fact that Jesus is not here only seems to confirm the myth. “Mexico will pay for the wall” is just a cheap lie that Trump tells because he knows what the rubes want to hear. Even if they KNOW he’s lying and just want to believe, it’s still not a myth, because they also know for a fact that it’s bullshit.
In this regard, there are three things to remember about lying. First and foremost: Never tell the same lie twice.  Second, never tell the mark a lie that he can (and will) immediately disprove. And third, don’t tell your mark that you like lying, and that you lie all the time.

In a 2015 Vox article, Dylan Matthews interviewed various scholarly experts on fascism and came to the conclusion that Trump was not a fascist for various reasons, such as that fascists emphasize violence as a virtue whereas Trump sees threats as a tool. (He rarely carries out major threats, and however incoherent he has been with regard to North Korea, he seems to think it would be a good idea to pursue peace with them.) But one point that is made in the article is that fascism is specifically anti-individualist, and Trump is the arch-individualist. “Whatever else can be said about Donald Trump, he is fiercely individualistic. Indeed, a major part of his appeal comes from the fact that he’s untethered to any movement or party or even financial interests besides himself. The Republican establishment hates him. He has no affiliated politicians at other levels of government. He runs no party organization or really any political organization with any goal other than promoting himself, personally. And his arguments about how to make America great generally rely on his own skills — his prowess at making deals, his personal strength, etc.” It’s also mentioned that fascism really doesn’t have too much regard for economics: “In fact, most experts think that it’s hard to identify a characteristically ‘fascist’ economic policy. It was all secondary to other goals, notably preparation for war.” Both of these points get to a critical difference between fascism and “Trumpism”: fascism is a systematic philosophy that holds that the state is greater than oneself.

This was all encapsulated in a Tweetstorm by liberal political writer Matthew Chapman,  which starts with “Believe it or not, Trump’s insane proclamation that he will keep tariffs in place until there are no more Mercedes on Fifth Avenue gave me a moment of clarity. I think I finally understand Trump’s economic philosophy now. And we are absolutely screwed.” He continues: “The one thing that you need to understand about Trump is that he is, at his core, a con man with no empathy. Therefore, he assumes that all other people are also con men with no empathy, and every exchange of goods and services that exists in the world is, on some level, a con. Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you’re not ripping someone off, you’re getting ripped off. … It’s not simply that Trump *doesn’t* think the Paris Climate Agreement, Iran nuclear deal, TPP, NAFTA, or luxury cars from Germany are a good deal for America. It’s that he *can’t* think that. It’s an alien concept to him that a deal other people want with us could also help us. … This is why Trump will never, ever, be able to negotiate with the rest of the world. He doesn’t believe in mutual benefit. The second anyone tells him ‘this is your end of the deal’ he’ll rip it up. He believes only one party can have an end of the deal, and it shouldn’t be him.”

And that is not only why Trump is going to find some way to fuck things up with Kim Jong-un (the way he pulled out of the Iran deal, and the Paris climate accords, and the G7), it’s why he can’t be can’t really be considered a fascist, because he has no ideology beyond what he wants at the moment, and no value greater than himself. How is a future American authoritarian going to count himself as a “Trumpist” when even Trump doesn’t know what that means?

There was an interview in Reason Magazine with libertarian(ish) Congressman Thomas Massie that’s been making the rounds recently.  Matt Welch interviewed him last year as Massie came to grips with the reality that once Republicans were in control, they weren’t the conservative-to-libertarian party they claimed to be. (Of course, I figured that out at least one Republican-majority government ago.) What really got Massie was the 2016 primary campaign as his candidate, Rand Paul, got taken down and Donald Trump dominated.
“But then when I went to Iowa I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron (Paul) earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”

It’s of a piece with the people who project the attitude that Trump and the “alt-right” display the real motives of libertarians and conservatives when most people who actually know anything about those philosophies know why Trump is the opposite. The fact that Trump has hewed so closely to Republican orthodoxy in office (when he deviated so much from it in the campaign) actually confirms this point. Trump doesn’t care enough about political philosophy to impose an agenda on Congress, and when he does get involved just fucks up what they want to do.  But they go along with him because just as they wouldn’t vote for anything Barack Obama wanted, a Democratic president wasn’t going to go along with anything they wanted, and a Republican one will. This just happens to be the only Republican who could get elected. Do you think Republicans would have won 2016 on the policy agenda and moxie of Jeb Bush? For that matter, IS there really a Republican Party that stands for liberty and a smaller, more accountable government? Because as we’ve seen, those guys aren’t getting elected. As much as some of us think that policy and philosophy matter, a lot of voters just don’t.

The real issue (especially for Democrats who wish they could just win an election and set things back to where they ‘should’ be) is that this isn’t just a Republican problem. George W. Bush defeated dull policy wonk Al Gore in 2000 (technically) and another dull functionary, John Kerry, in 2004. So Democrats were eight years in the wilderness before they came back in 2008 with Barack Obama, a genuinely engaging and visionary personality. But he didn’t really push much beyond the passage of the ACA, and while that probably was worth it in the long run, it burned up not only Obama’s political capital, but that of Democrats in general. Obama did win re-election against Mitt Romney – with some difficulty – but Democrats lost the House majority in 2010 and the Senate majority in 2014. Moreover, Democrats have less seats in state legislatures than ever. Even as Obama and his vision of progressive government gained in appeal, Democrats as a party failed to reach out to the country at large, because they could never figure out their priorities and how to connect with the public.

When policy is not merely secondary to politics but actively discarded, and personality is the only thing that matters, of course Trump is going to have an edge over a dour wonk like Hillary Clinton, because however obnoxiously evil he is, he’s at least got pizzazz. Sort of like a pro wrestling heel. Which of course, Trump actually is.

To return to the question, there are real differences between fascism and state socialism. One reason that Leninist governments lasted longer than fascist ones is that communist governments had a central committee structure that could survive the death of a strongman. (Of course, another factor is that most communist governments did not start wars when they were outnumbered.) But while communist governments were themselves frequently run by strongmen, they had a government structure that fascist regimes lacked. By comparison however, fascist governments still had more structure than what this administration has now.

I mean, I can see why fundamentalists love Trump. Their concept of morality has always been transactional, so of course they don’t care that Trump acts like King Herod on coke as long as they get the Supreme Court justices they want and he picks on the people they hate. But if you’re a fiscal conservative/”economic libertarian”, your bargain is more problematic, since whatever you gained with the tax cut is threatened by the trade wars. And if you’re one of the middle-to-working-class people who voted for Trump, you’re expected to cover that tax cut with a reduction in your own benefits, not to mention that you’re obliged to pay for Trump’s Wall.

There is no policy or philosophy that can justify supporting Trump other than sheer attitude. In foreign policy, that attitude is best expressed as “we’re America, bitch.”  But domestically, it comes down to “we can screw anybody we want, because we’re the biggest gang.” But as I’ve told conservatives at least once, there’s just one problem with that attitude: Republicans aren’t the biggest gang.

On May 22^nd, National Review Online posted an article by scholar Victor Davis Hanson, called “The Trump Rationale,” attempting to explain Donald Trump’s lasting appeal to his base. The article’s subheader is: “His voters knew what they were getting, and most support him still.”

The piece does indeed explain the psychology of the Trump supporter, though perhaps not in the way Hanson intended. To properly review it, I decided it needs a good old-fashioned fisking.

(A note: ‘fisking‘ refers to an incident where the left-wing journalist Robert Fisk had one of his columns demolished by a right-winger, point by point. The term should not be confused with ‘fisting,’ although the intention and result are often similar.)

“1) Was Trump disqualified by his occasional but demonstrable character flaws and often rank vulgarity? To believe that plaint, voters would have needed a standard by which both past media of coverage of the White House and the prior behavior of presidents offered some useful benchmarks. Unfortunately, the sorts of disturbing things we know about Trump we often did not know in the past about other presidents. By any fair measure, the sexual gymnastics in the White House and West Wing of JFK and Bill Clinton, both successful presidents, were likely well beyond President Trump’s randy habits. “ (et cetera…)

This sort of thing is why the average person is more and more cynical, because both houses of the duopoly are doing their utmost to promote the ideal that might makes right and “objective morality” is just a consolation prize for losers. Recall that in the days of Monicagate, the people on Hanson’s side – I was one of them – were railing about how tolerating Bill Clinton’s immorality was going to degrade the political culture. Now that the “conservatives” benefit from that degraded standard, they act like it was handed down from Saint Augustine. Meanwhile, Democrats offered the same defenses “conservatives” offer now, they benefited from Clinton’s popularity, and in more recent years they got a lot of their precious campaign money from the likes of Harvey Weinstein (and we’re alternately supposed to believe that either ‘everybody knew’ or ‘nobody knew’ about his violations). And now that enabling misogyny has bitten them in the ass last election, liberals have developed an acute case of scruples.

In any case, this particular subject is something I’ve already addressed on a semi-regular basis. We do not need to go over how many areas of complaint that Republicans have with Democrats, the Clintons in particular, to compare to what Trump and his cronies are actually doing. Comparison of rhetoric to fact just demonstrates that for all the erudition of Victor Davis Hanson – and I used to be a fan – he is providing a rationalization, not a rationale. During the campaign and certainly now, support for Trump was less a matter of rationality and more an appeal to tribal emotionalism. I wish these guys had just been honest enough to say: “Don’t vote for the liberal bitch who lies to you, ignores security procedures and exploits financial corruption. Vote for the conservative white guy who does all of that in spades!”

“2) Personal morality and public governance are related, but we are not always quite sure how. Jimmy Carter was both a more moral person and a worse president than Bill Clinton. Jerry Ford was a more ethical leader than Donald Trump — and had a far worse first 16 months. FDR was a superb wartime leader — and carried on an affair in the White House, tried to pack and hijack the Supreme Court, sent U.S. citizens into internment camps, and abused his presidential powers in ways that might get a president impeached today. In the 1944 election, the Republican nominee Tom Dewey was the more ethical — and stuffy — man. In matters of spiritual leadership and moral role models, we wish that profane, philandering (including an affair with his step-niece), and unsteady General George S. Patton had just conducted himself in private and public as did the upright General Omar Bradley. But then we would have wished even more that Bradley had just half the strategic and tactical skill of Patton. If he had, thousands of lives might have been spared in the advance to the Rhine. Trump is currently not carrying on an affair with his limousine driver, as Ike probably was with Kay Summersby while commanding all Allied forces in Europe following D-Day. Rarely are both qualities, brilliance and personal morality, found in a leader — even among our greatest, such as the alcoholic Grant or the foul-mouthed and occasionally crude Truman. “

All of which is setting up a false choice between personal morality and brilliance (or even competence). It is false not because this conflict cannot be observed in history, but because Trump is neither moral nor brilliant. Unless grifting counts as brilliance, in which case he’s fuckin’ Leonardo da Vinci.

“3) Trump did not run in a vacuum. A presidential vote is not a one-person race for sainthood but, like it or not, often a choice between a bad and worse option. Hillary Clinton would have likely ensured a 16-year progressive regnum. “

Everything is always “but Clinton would be worse.” No doubt this will continue to be the excuse no matter what depth Trump reaches: Clinton will always be worse, even when it is demonstrable that Trump is worse, if simply due to the fact that he’s the actual president now.

“As far as counterfactual “what ifs” go, by 2024, at the end of Clinton’s second term, a conservative might not have recognized the federal judiciary, given the nature of lifetime appointees. The lives of millions of Americans would have been radically changed in an Obama-Clinton economy that probably would not have seen GDP or unemployment levels that Americans are now enjoying. “

I’ll just leave this here: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/27/606078181/economy-probably-started-2018-off-slow-short-of-trumps-growth-target

“What John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Peter Strzok, Sally Yates, and others did in 2016 would never have been known — given that their likely obstruction, lying, and lawbreaking were predicated on being unspoken recommendations for praise and advancement in a sure-thing Clinton administration. Christopher Steele might have either been unknown — or lionized. “

But YOU would have been making it known, Victor. You and the other guys in the “conservative” grievance media, in the same way that you are making hay from these people now, and no one except the grievance media and their audience particularly cares. Because while certain elements – like Bill Clinton demanding an audience at the airport with Loretta Lynch over Hillary’s email investigation – deserved bipartisan attention, even the valid points of investigation don’t get it because the whole complaint is smothered in bad faith.

“4) Something had gone haywire with the Republican party at the national level. “

Finally, a point of agreement.

“The proverbial Republican elite had become convinced that globalization, open borders, and free but unfair trade were either unstoppable or the fated future or simply irrelevant. Someone or something — even if painfully and crudely delivered — was bound to arise to remind the conservative Washington–New York punditocracy, the party elite, and Republican opinion makers that a third of the country had all but tuned them out. It was no longer sustainable to expect the conservative base to vote for more versions of sober establishmentarians like McCain and Romney just because they were Republicans, well-connected, well-résuméd, well-known, well-behaved, and played by the gloves-on Marquess of Queensberry political rules. Instead, such men and much of orthodox Republican ideology were suspect.

“Amnestied illegal aliens would not in our lifetimes become conservative family-values voters. Vast trade deficits with China and ongoing chronic commercial cheating would not inevitably lead to the prosperity that would guarantee Chinese democracy. Asymmetrical trade deals were not sacrosanct under the canons of free trade. Unfettered globalization, outsourcing, and offshoring were not both inevitable and always positive. The losers of globalization did not bring their misery on themselves. The Iran deal was not better than nothing. North Korea would not inevitably remain nuclear. Middle East peace did not hinge of constant outreach to and subsidy of the corrupt and autocratic Palestinian Authority and Hamas cliques. “

The first part, that the Republican elite was irrelevant to the average voter, let alone the average Republican, is true. The second part is more rationalizing. Assuming that Trump’s policies are a constructive approach to illegal immigration, China’s unfair trade practices, North Korea or the Middle East is to deny the fact that Trump has no care about any of these things and knows that much less.

The hardcore critique of the Republican establishment, whether one is a populist or “economic conservative” is that Republican leadership doesn’t care about the average voter. But that’s because Republicans have always tried to split the difference between appealing to the people who fund their campaigns and the people who actually vote for them, even though these two priorities are often at odds. The punch line to the joke is that this is exactly what they’re doing now, because Trump is the only person who appeals to both camps, and as long as he’s throwing red meat to the culture warriors, they won’t care that the rich sponsors are soaking the poor.

“5) Lots of deep-state rust needed scraping. Yet it is hard to believe that either a Republican or Democratic traditionalist would have seen unemployment go below 4 percent, or the GDP rate exceed 3 percent, or would have ensured the current level of deregulation and energy production. A President Mitt Romney might not have rammed through a tax-reform policy like that of the 2017 reform bill. I cannot think of a single Republican 2016 candidate who either could or would have in succession withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, demanded China recalibrate its asymmetrical and often unfair mercantile trade policies, sought to secure the border, renounced the Iran deal, moved to denuclearize North Korea, and hectored front-line NATO allies that their budgets do not reflect their promises or the dangers on their borders. “

Something approaching substance here. The hardcore Republicans are indeed getting a lot of what they want from this president, and I think we can agree that President Romney would not have “rammed through” what he wanted, because as a career politician he was raised on procedure and not might-makes-right. So were Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, but they at least as much as Trump set the stage for an environment where Republicans “ram through” everything they want with absolutely no regard for the other people on the floor. Not that Democrats deserve any special courtesy, but it’s rather telling that the less popular mandate Republican policies have, the more fanatic they are at enforcing them, not despite popular will, but actively against it. And even though one arm of that political machine is voter suppression, the more the ruling faction acts in defiance of outside reality, the more likely they are to come to error, which will only serve to compound their unpopularity. Creating such a radical “rammed through” regime was always a bad idea. It usually is when the midterm election after a new president’s election leads to a severe loss in seats to the ruling party, even when it isn’t deliberately TRYING to piss off the nonpartisan voter. Ask the Democrats. The last time they had both houses of Congress, they used it to pass Obamacare, and they lost their Senate majority just in time for the Census. Another hint: It’s easier to roll back tax cuts than expansions to the medical bureaucracy.

“6) Something or someone was needed to remind the country that there is no longer a Democratic party as we once knew it. It is now a progressive and identity-politics religious movement. “

I just find it odd that a conservative in National Review is using the term “religious movement” as a pejorative. Unless Hanson, like many of us, has reached the conclusion that most religious movements are not introspective attempts to find values in the transcendent, but shabby pretexts for justifying political prejudices on the grounds that some things cannot be explained by reason. If he believes this, I say: welcome to the club.

“Trump took on his left-wing critics as few had before, did not back down, and did not offer apologies. He traded blow for blow with them. “

And I’ve mentioned that one point of value in Trump is that his don’t-give-a-fuck attitude is instructive for anyone who wants to counter the crybully tactics of the Left. But that still begs the question of what you are going to replace the old liberal order with, and Hanson leaves himself empty-handed when he says, in so many words, “look, Eisenhower diddled his staff chauffeur, and things turned out great.”

The point is not that personal immorality is an automatic disqualifier for a statesman. But is it an automatic qualifier? Are we approving on the basis of vices instead of virtues? Of course even Hanson isn’t so dense as to explicitly assert this, even if that is what he is asserting implicitly. What you do is judge an individual on balance. That is why history judges Martin Luther King Jr. as positive on the whole (despite his adultery), why the historical judgment on Bill Clinton is far more ambiguous, and why the judgment on Donald Trump is already decidedly in the negative.

Of course, that could change. Trump could get a peace deal with North Korea, although maybe not.  Even if he did, that might not put him on the side of the angels. After all, in 1929, Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty, creating Vatican City in Rome and thus solving the diplomatic impasse between the secular Italian state and the “captive” Papacy. This is an achievement that stands to this day. Why then did Mussolini end his life executed, dragged through the street and hung up to be spat on and jeered at by his former subjects? Well, I guess after you kill political opponents, gas Ethiopians, turn the military into a joke and turn the government into a collaborator with the Holocaust, people judge you on balance.

“In the end, only the people will vote on Trumpism. His supporters knew full well after July 2016 that his possible victory would come with a price — one they deemed more than worth paying given the past and present alternatives. “

Quite. Even if Democrats get Congress back this year (and again, these guys could find a way to strike out in a whorehouse), you need two-thirds of the Senate to impeach. Republicans couldn’t do it to Clinton when the country was far less polarized. But then, Clinton was far more popular. And the reason why Democrats might get the House back is that America has paid the price for Trump, and now that we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore (I fucking hope), Trump has lost his one surefire rallying point. That’s why he keeps relitigating an election that he WON, so that his dupes will have something to rile them up rather than think about how the country is scarcely better off than it was under Obama.

“To calibrate the national mood, they simply ask Trump voters whether they regret their 2016 votes (few do) “

https://www.facebook.com/IRegretVotingForTrump/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/us-small-farmers-regret-voting-trump-180330092417106.html

http://prospect.org/article/how-ambivalent-trump-voters-feel-about-him-now

“and whether any Never Trump voters might reconsider (some are), “

Again, that depends on whether Republicans can rally enough people around being the NotDemocrat party when that’s really all they have to offer. Based on the latest round of special elections and primaries, I’m not so sure.

“and then they’re usually reassured that what is happening is what they thought would happen: a 3 percent GDP economy, low unemployment, record energy production, pushbacks on illegal immigration, no Iran deal, no to North Korean missiles pointed at the U.S., renewed friendship with Israel and the Gulf states, a deterrent foreign policy, stellar judicial appointments — along with Robert Mueller, Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, and lots more, no doubt, to come. “

Drip, drip, drip, Trumpniks.

The Canadian debate series The Munk Debates had an event in Toronto Friday May 18, on the thesis “Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress.” The debate was speaker Michael Eric Dyson and New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg on the side of political correctness with the opposition represented by British celebrity Stephen Fry and University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxYimeaoea0

Fry of course was awesome. Goldberg came off very well, and for the most part, so did Dyson, though calling Peterson a “mean white man” was a low blow that did not do him any favors. I also think he didn’t realize how badly that would play with Peterson’s hometown crowd.

Peterson nevertheless was the weakest part of the event. He first gained the attention of people like myself when he was interviewed by an opinionated person from Britain’s Channel 4,  and came off as the reasonable person against somebody trying to push an agenda. This time he was the one who was irritated that no one was stressing his agenda, which includes among other premises the idea that the root of political correctness is an attempt to foist Marxist concepts onto Western culture in order to undermine it. And when insulted by Dyson, he actually would have been more effective if he’d made a brief rebuttal and then let it go, but the situation clearly unbalanced him.

Problem is, the issue isn’t quite as simple as saying that political correctness is all bad. Neither is it all good. Fry describes himself as a liberal, but took the “anti” position. Goldberg is pro-political correctness on the whole, but in her opening statement said there were some aspects of the movement that she wasn’t on board with, though she didn’t specify what they were. Fry had mentioned in his opening statement, “I believe that one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right rather than to be effective.” I have mentioned that on balance, I think that a lot of the “politically correct” movements, like #metoo, are vehicles for progress and the people in charge are dealing with the current moment in a reasonable manner. But there are examples of excess.

The main example that comes to my mind was the takedown of Minnesota’s Democratic Senator, Al Franken. Last year, former model and USO supporter Leann Tweeden described a USO tour with Franken in 2006 (when he was still a comic coming off his career at Saturday Night Live) and alleged that he French-kissed her without consent during rehearsal of a skit, and was also photographed pretending to reach for her breasts while she slept. After this accusation was made public, several other women came forward with similar stories that they said took place during Franken’s political career in Minnesota. This sort of thing would normally have gone through the Senate Ethics Committee for internal review, a process that Franken agreed to submit to. But several Democratic politicians, namely Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D – New York) called for his immediate resignation. But we know what was really going on. Liberals could see that the real problem was Trump being a misogynist thug, but they can’t do anything about that, so in order to “do something” they decided to single out a problematic person who could be leveraged, and thus removed one of their own most popular and effective advocates from politics.

And this is why I don’t trust the Left to stop gun violence. Or to stop Trump. Or to do… well, anything. I mean, the Left are like a coyote that chewed off three paws but is still caught in the bear trap.

But on reflection, what strikes me is that the “pro-PC” side was represented by Americans with their Constitution and free speech tradition, while the anti-PC side were two citizens of the Commonwealth. It might be because, from their perspective, they can see where we’re headed. In particular, Stephen Fry, being a gay atheist and socialist whose positions were historically not always popular, is very much aware that one’s right to a position should not be dependent on its political popularity.