James Gillen

Rule of law implies that every citizen is subject to the law, including lawmakers themselves. In this sense, it stands in contrast to an autocracy, dictatorship, or oligarchy where the rulers are held above the law. Lack of the rule of law can be found in both democracies and dictatorships, for example because of neglect or ignorance of the law, and the rule of law is more apt to decay if a government has insufficient corrective mechanisms for restoring it.

-Wikipedia entry, Rule of law

Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power – with our participation, and the choices we make. Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.

-Barack Obama’s Presidential Farewell Speech, January 10, 2017

I have said there are certain axioms I go by, especially in politics. The first is, “it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.” The second is, “every new President somehow lowers the bar.”

Recently Reason magazine’s online site published an opinion piece by Nick Gillespie in which he took the position- shared by some others- that President Obama’s use of executive powers and unilateral actions set the stage for Donald Trump or another conservative to take even more questionable actions. I posted the Reason link on my Facebook page and my advocacy for Gillespie’s position was rather unpopular. Perhaps because of the subheader, “Where were Democrats when Obama was going power-mad? Egging him on, mostly.” Now as we know, Facebook does not adhere to the human conceit of linear time, so I cannot retrieve the conversations I had on the subject, but among other things, I’m told that the problem with the libertarian position (for example, Gillespie, and myself) is that we think government should be kept small and relatively powerless because bad people will get into power. Which is simplistic. The realist position is that, in any case, we have a large government, and it is not impossible that it can have bad actors in it. As James Madison said, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”

This skepticism towards power is not a specifically libertarian position. In fact, the Founders wanted a government that was more powerful than the Articles of Confederation.  The Federalist Papers (written mainly by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison) endorsed a constitutional system with a strong executive branch and a separate judiciary. It was necessary for the Federalists to write these papers to advocate for the project because, believe it or not, the idea of a strong federal government did not have universal support at the time. The Constitution was ratified because public debate, including the Federalist letters, clarified the principle of enumerated rights within the system as well as the separation of powers, or “checks and balances” between the branches to ensure a balance between them so that the necessity of a strong government did not threaten liberty. It was around this time (1780) that John Adams, in helping write the Massachusetts Constitution, devised the phrase “a government of laws and not of men.”  In other words, a good government can survive bad people because the “system” – both the written laws and the adherence to them – prevents an unscrupulous individual from abusing his power. Indeed, the need for checks and balances becomes MORE important the more powerful you want government to get.

However, the key is that the laws are adhered to. And this has been a problem especially since the 20^th Century, when the necessities of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War caused the Congress and the public to ignore many of the restrictions on the President, especially on his role as Commander in Chief. This standard gave presidents a lot of leeway, and eventually led to our involvement in Vietnam. That in turn led to a backlash which led to the passage of the War Powers Act in 1973, which has been less and less invoked by Congress since then, even as the country gets more and more involved in war (indeed, Barack Obama is described as the first president to spend two full terms at war). Thus, the Congress doesn’t even enforce the after-the-fact measure that it enacted after admitting it had given the president too much power. That is only one concrete example of how the inertia of tradition, or deference to authority (or just political expediency) undermines the primary safeguard for holding authority accountable.

But the main objection I got to that point, believe it or not, is that what the president does does not set a precedent that his successors are expected to follow. This is a position that seems to conflate the general use of “precedent” with the legal concept of stare decisis.  In terms of what I’ve described, the actions of both the president and Congress create a change in the political atmosphere that affects what is possible.  For instance, I asked that if a president’s use of unilateral executive orders could simply be reversed by the next president’s unilateral orders, why didn’t Obama simply get rid of Bush’s Guantanamo Bay prison? And I was reminded that closing Guantanamo was actually one of President Obama’s first executive orders, which has since been effectively blocked by Congress through various means, including blocking of funds needed to transfer prisoners.  So there is that. But if anything it only proves the point. Once government does something, even if it’s immoral or legally questionable, actually questioning it gets seen as un-American. It all comes down to politics.  In response to my counter-arguments, I was told that given the current composition of the Republican Party, the issues with the Democrats, whatever they may be, don’t change the point that the Democrats are clearly superior. Republicans are not going to hold their own accountable any more than Democrats are. Thus we should only elect the “right” people.

This idea, even to the extent that I agree with it, is disturbing not merely for the implication that American government is only as good as the current King on the throne. More broadly, the implication is that for some time now, we have only had one real political party, because the modern conception of government is now impossible outside allegiance to the Democratic Party, and if you have any disagreement with it, the only escape is to join the overgrown babies screaming, “get your socialism out of my Medicare!” To say nothing of the point that the traditional adversarial relationship between various groups in the system becomes less a matter of each side holding each other accountable and more the “in” group defending the indefensible versus the “out” group trying to score points on them so they can take over. So much for “a government of laws and not of men.”

Because if only one party is (even halfway) responsible, that just makes social precedent all the more relevant. Gillespie started his article by alluding to the now-famous Meryl Streep speech at the Golden Globes awards this year,  where she talked about Donald Trump’s public impression of a disabled reporter: “this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect; violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” Streep is saying that such behavior from a politician is a challenge to the political norms that had hitherto prevailed, and that if such a challenge is not defeated, it becomes the new standard. In other words, a precedent.

During the Clinton Administration, moral conservatives, back when such creatures existed, were making the argument that Bill Clinton’s exposure as a pathological liar and sex maniac meant that he was disqualified for the office of the President. At the time, Democrats scoffed. Now Hillary Clinton has lost an election because a strong plurality of Americans are okay with the idea of the president being a pathological liar and sex maniac. I believe this is what some Eastern religions call “karma.”

If there is no such thing as precedent, even on a social level, and what the President does doesn’t change the standard for his successors, why is Meryl Streep, or anyone, so worried about what Trump does? Why then do judgment and critique matter less and not more when your party is in charge, and you want to KEEP them in charge?

Is it really as simple as “it’s okay when it’s our guy?”

Government is not a matter where you can grade on a curve, even when your kid is a C student and the other kids are riding the short bus.

When a Reason article speculates that a president has left “a loaded weapon lying around”  for his successor to use, that is not just libertarian rhetoric. It is a fact. Consider that Donald Trump has neither the intellect nor the political grounding to formulate policy himself, and neither do most of his plutocratic supporters/Cabinet members. Apologists might argue that such unscrupulous people would seize power regardless, but Democrats, specifically Obama, made it that much easier for them by initiating expansions of the state – when they were not approving them under George W. Bush. In this way, Democratic dysfunction facilitates Republican dysfunction. Indeed, I could make the case that Republicans need Democrats to help them destroy the country. Because if they can’t even come up with a fake half-assed plan to replace Obamacare after more than six years of huffing and puffing about it, then Republicans clearly have no capacity for new ideas.

A government by the majority will require the majority to be people of character and self-control, able to restrain their passions rather than assuming that government exists to indulge them. It is in this respect, more than in terms of an Evangelical religion that did not exist in his time, that John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  In previous ages, it would have been a conservative making that point. But these days, conservatives are that much more devoted than liberals are to the mentality of “it’s okay when it’s our guy.” So for guidance, they’re worse than useless.

I bring this stuff up, and I’m asked, “Do you seriously think Donald Trump would pay any attention to these limits at all?” Such a position is itself naive, or paradoxically, naive cynicism. If you do not demand even conditional standards from officials on “your team” you are in no position to enforce standards on officials who do not want them at all. Which only encourages a perception among the apolitical that “both sides are the same.” Which in turn serves to legitimize the other side, no matter how dysfunctional and immoral it is, thus increasing the odds of the scenario liberals say they want to avoid.

Liberals are correct in emphasizing the mistakes and overall evil of the Trump team and the new Republican Congress, because that’s the threat we’ve got to deal with now, and because, whether conservatives and libertarians want to admit this or not, the Republican agenda is much more destructive to the country than the Democratic one. But let us be clear on something. As long as the first-past-the-post political structure and the schemes of the duopoly ensure that you can only have two feasible parties in this country, it will be that much harder for people to think outside that box, which means the only escape from Republican tyranny is Democratic rule, and vice versa. For Democrats to regain power, they have to convince people, including some of those who ought to be most in agreement with them, that the Republicans would not be better for the country. And that is where Democrats have been falling down. The lesson of this election should be that the Republicans could have nominated a two-headed sewer mutant with an IQ of negative 6 (just as long as he was anti-abortion) and the average non-Republican would have said, “It may be a freakish imbecile, but at least it’s not Hillary Clinton.”

But I’ve talked about this online, and I bring up Gillespie’s thesis that Obama has lowered the bar, and I get denial. And then I share a Vox article where the reporter makes much the same point as Gillespie, only with that much more history and documentation. And that gets blown off too.

I am beginning to realize that conservatives are not the only ones immune to evidence.

Which is why, as Donald Trump starts his first week as President of the United States, I despair for the future of this country. Because I am not sure what is worse: “Conservatives” who insist on acting like apes, or liberals who ACT like they’ve got some sense but cannot draw logical conclusions from available data.

 

Now that we are in the last day of the Obama Administration, it seems like time to review his presidency in full, especially since it’s likely that after January 20, Trump will end up selling the Internet to the Russian FSB.

Some have argued that the president’s biggest mistake was using up all his political capital to push the Affordable Care Act, but I think that probably would have been an issue anyway, given the costs of healthcare to the private sector, and I think Obama was gambling on the long term. As both liberals and their right-wing critics know, once a bill becomes law, it is almost never repealed, expired, or gotten rid of, even when it is flawed and unpopular. In this case, the ACA is not merely flawed and unpopular, but flawed, unpopular, and the only thing allowing a bunch of high-risk patients to get medical coverage when previously they could not.

There are some other areas where people have found flaws with the president’s policies and others where he gets probably more credit than he is due. These opinions vary mainly on one’s political persuasion. My opinion, which I think will be shared by some professional analysts, is that as a President, Barack Obama was good but could have been better, and in a couple cases was not only disappointing but created consequences that helped lead to a rather dire situation in both diplomacy and domestic politics.

It comes down to two examples, since in both cases, the fault is an assumption – possibly a naive assumption – that challenges have no meaning, whether offered against you or whether made by you.

The first challenge: During this administration, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was famously quoted as saying “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for Barack Obama to be a one-term president.” Even this matter has a certain context that we need to examine in retrospect. Contrary to popular belief, McConnell didn’t make his statement on “Day One” of the Obama presidency, but just before the 2010 midterms when the Democrats lost their Congressional majority.

Specifically, a Washington Post article examining the quote also mentioned a speech McConnell gave after the 2010 midterms, where he said: “Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office. But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things it is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things. We can hope the President will start listening to the electorate after Tuesday’s election. But we can’t plan on it. And it would be foolish to expect that Republicans will be able to completely reverse the damage Democrats have done as long as a Democrat holds the veto pen.”

Mitch McConnell has no ties to Vladimir Putin or Bashir al-Assad. Whatever you may think of him, he is an American, raised within the American political system to be a reasonable politician. Or at least he was. But then he decided to ride the tiger of the Tea Party and Trumpism, which were direct reactions to Barack Obama being president (remember, Donald Trump was one of the first celebrity ‘birthers’ demanding Obama’s birth certificate, even before running for president). And that meant that McConnell had to gauge whether being unreasonable was going to pay off. Clearly that was what the “base” wanted. But to work, that strategy had to be unchallenged by the opposition. It paid off because the Democrats under Obama’s leadership did not grasp how serious Republicans were about challenging the Obama Administration, even as they were losing the Congressional seats they needed to prevent Republican obstructionism. Indeed, gaining the majority was the major step the Republicans needed to get to where they are now. They did not actually make Obama a one term president. But if their goal was to undo what President Obama did, they had to get a Republican to replace him. It just ended up taking two terms.

When your opponent tells you what he’s going to do, take him seriously. McConnell and the Republicans didn’t actually say they wanted to stop Obama on “Day One.” But they were able to make that statement when they got a Congressional majority two years into Obama’s eight-year term. At that point, Democrats knew that Republicans were basing their campaigns on repealing Obamacare and other Obama initiatives, and that this required Democrats to lose seats in addition to the White House. That meant the Democrats had six years and three Congressional elections to react. And in response, Democrats under Obama ended up losing more House seats under Obama than under any president since Harry Truman. Moreover, between 2008 and 2015, the Democrats ended up losing a total of 10 percent of their seats in the US Senate, 19 percent of their seats in the House of Representatives, 20 percent of their strength in state legislatures AND almost 36 percent of their state governors.

Why was this, exactly? Liberals love to blame the gerrymandering of states by Republican legislatures, but this is blanking out the point that Republicans needed to win a majority in state governments to do that in the first place. A large part of this is that state populations in the Midwest and the former industrial areas of the country are becoming less Democratic and more Republican. These same areas used to be very important bases for the Democratic Party’s union support, but union jobs are not as common as they were in previous decades, which gets into the other matter that the “worker’s” party is not doing a good job of protecting workers. (Incidentally, Democrats, the fact that you didn’t get votes in the middle of the country during the last election is for the same reason you were losing seats in the previous midterm elections, independently of whether the Electoral College exists or not.) In any event, by the point of McConnell’s declaration, if not much earlier (say, when the Republicans voted to a man to reject Obama’s stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act), Obama and the Democrats should have realized that their old concepts of bipartisan compromise were not going to apply and they had to do things themselves, which ultimately means they needed to keep and get more seats in Congress. As any NFL fan will tell you, you could have the greatest quarterback in the world and it won’t matter if his offensive line is tissue paper and he keeps getting sacked.

The other challenge was the one Obama made himself and failed to back up. On August 20, 2012, President Obama commented on the civil war in Syria and Bashar al-Assad’s oppression of his own people, specifically saying, “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.” Well, in 2013, the Administration reported that Assad had used sarin gas on its own people, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel also said “We still have uncertainties about what was used, what kind of chemicals was used, where it was used, who used it.”  In other words, Obama drew a red line against Assad and allowed him to cross it without consequences.

In his defense, Obama probably could not have done much, given the depletion of our military under George W. Bush and the likelihood that Republican obstructionism would extend even to the president’s role as Commander in Chief. But in that case, he didn’t have to make a statement that would only weaken American “soft power” knowing that it was unlikely that hard power would back it up. Especially given that even now, people disregard the consequences of the Administration’s passivity in the conflict. Syria is now the main source of the wave of Arabic-speaking refugees that move primarily through NATO allies Greece and Turkey into the central European Union countries such as Germany, in such large numbers that allegedly liberal countries are obliged to deal with their own xenophobia as well as the practical limits of their public support systems. This instability in the center of the NATO alliance strengthens the position of Russia, which along with its ally Iran is the primary support for the Assad regime. That is probably not a coincidence. At least it doesn’t seem so to me, although it seemed to be a surprise to the Administration, given that it took revelations of Russian spying against Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign for Obama to increase sanctions and take action against Russian diplomats in this country- after Clinton had already lost the election. So again we have a case where the Obama Administration didn’t seriously consider the challenge against it until it was directly damaged, and even then the response was too little, and way too late.

I have often thought of Obama as a conservative. Not in the modern “we hate abortion and gays” sense of the political alignment, but in the generic sense of the word, referring to someone who plays it safe and doesn’t try to change institutional norms too much except where warranted. Overall, I consider that one of his good points. He was not some fatigue-wearing socialist trying to take everybody’s guns. He was the reasonable, decent person who was exactly what America needed at this point in its history. But that temperamental conservatism also was a weakness in that he did not challenge the institutions even when such challenge was warranted, for example in not taking punitive measures against Wall Street’s destructive financial practices at a point when that would have been popular with liberals AND conservatives.

Barack Obama was a good president, but in large measure the Obama Administration is a giant missed opportunity. This even considering that he was dealing with a Republican Party caught in a downward spiral of hatred toward him in particular, and as we now see, has no idea of how to do things better than the Democrats, because hate is all they have. But when Democrats are the only party with a policy, it still has to be judged on its own merits, and if it fails, it cannot be expected to prevail, whether an alternative exists or not. However the need to judge the relative merits of the Democratic Party seems to undermine the need to judge the objective merits of the Democratic Party, at least as far as its partisans are concerned. In other words, we can see where the Republican Party has undermined the system but liberals aren’t willing to judge where Democrats have undermined it. I intend to address this in my next post.

Hi, Trump voters!

As you know, after the election, the Obama Administration commissioned an intelligence report to determine whether or how Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Last Friday President Barack Obama and president-elect Donald Trump were briefed on this report by the heads of the major intelligence agencies, and the capsule description of that report was released to the mainstream media on Tuesday.  However, a dossier, only slightly redacted, was leaked to Buzzfeed and released by them Tuesday night.  And it contained rather specific details on how Russia – allegedly – compromised Donald Trump to use as a friendly asset to influence the American government through his election.  And while in his January 11 press conference, Trump grudgingly admitted Russia “might” have interfered with the elections, he angrily denied the gist of the reports.

But while compromising Trump most likely was a project going back several years before the 2016 campaign, since that campaign it’s become eminently clear that however thin-skinned Donald Trump is, he is immune to blackmail or even embarrassment.  Recall, this guy started his campaign by generalizing Mexicans as drug smugglers and rapists.  He got caught telling Billy Bush, “Grab ’em by the pussy, you can do whatever you want.”  It is NOT NEWS that Donald Trump is a disgusting pig.  That is what he campaigned as, AND THAT IS WHY YOU VOTED FOR HIM.  He’s not politically correct, and he doesn’t play nice.

The thing is, even if the most salacious rumor turns out to be not true, or a 4Chan troll of the press, it doesn’t matter.  Because it fits the image that Trump has deliberately cultivated for himself.  And when your reputation is bolstered by the likes of 4Chan and Breitbart, accusations of “fake news” are a bit cute.  As an acquaintance told me, it’s like a reverse Boy Who Cried Wolf.  And Trump is a public figure.  By now, he ought to be used to having egg on his face.  So to speak.  But even if Trump is a disgusting pig, not everyone who voted for him is.  And it is those people that I need to address.  Because you need to take responsibility for your choice.

Look, Trump fans: I know you’re pissed.

And you have a right to be.  This trumped-up accusation is the lowest form of yellow journalism.

But you’re going to have to accept that from this day forward until he leaves office, Donald Trump is going to be a steady stream of embarrassing news for you.  And you’re going to be in the same position of the Hillary Clinton fans, trying to defend her reputation from the constant, daily, drip, drip, drip.

And it doesn’t take a huge whiz to figure out why.

Trump has made an enemy of the American intelligence establishment.  He’s made an enemy of the Luegenpresse.  And you know how they are.  If they want to go after you, they’ll just keep splashing stuff against the wall until something sticks.

It’s like that Russian military doctrine: Spray a giant hose of ammo downrange over a wide area, and you’re bound to hit something.  I don’t know what the Russian word for it is, but I think the US military calls it “the Golden PP Theory.”

Again, Trump voters, I know you’re angry.  You’re probably feeling a bitter, or at least salty, taste in your mouths right now.  But again, you knew that this was what you were going to get, and you voted for it anyway.  My suggestion is to make that anger work for you.  You need to take a hard, serious look at this president-elect, and the other Republicans you voted for, and then flip the switch on them.

Because personally I think it is better to be pissed off, than pissed on.

 

Well, on December 19, our last hope of avoiding Orange Julius Caesar was supposed to be the official Electoral College vote, which various liberal press outlets were telling us might have been subverted, with people like Lawrence Tribe saying at least 30 Electors were discussing voting against Donald Trump. As it turned out, only two (Texas) Republican electors voted against Trump, but not for Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, five Hillary Clinton electors went against her (three for Colin Powell, one for Bernie Sanders and one for a protestor at the Standing Rock site) and others would have voted against Clinton if they had not been shot down by their state officials. So it’s now confirmed: Hillary Clinton is THE worst presidential candidate in American history.

I am now a lot more convinced that (whatever the likelihood) we need to get rid of the Electoral College, not only because the institution that was intended to prevent a foreign-sponsored conniver with “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” from getting the presidency is the vehicle being used to enact that result, but that the ostensible threat of an unqualified candidate becoming the president would not have been possible – in this case and almost any others – if the presidential election was a national popular vote.

In fact- and this is just my theory here, and I’m going out on a limb with it- but it may be that the process of devolving political power to as many citizens as possible serves to make it less likely that bad decisions will be made in government, compared to government by an absolute monarch or cabal. Contrary to liberals, the Electoral College in theory serves two legitimate purposes. The one that we actually pay attention to is that it addresses the interests of states and regional communities as opposed to just collecting a national vote that would give that much more influence to large population centers like California and New York. But the other, according to The Federalist #68,  was “that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption” including “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils [by] raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union”, and BOY did the EC fail there. So the Electoral College may have served the first purpose of federalism/regionalism but by utterly betraying the latter, and far more important, purpose.

But given all that, we all have to figure out where we are, which partially means figuring out how we got here, and then figuring out where to go from here.

Democrats: The lesson here is that the Republicans went out of their way to nominate the most repellent and incompetent presidential candidate of all time, and the Democratic National Committee took that as a challenge.

Basically, a good message beats a bad message, but a bad message beats no message. And on a national level, Democrats really had no message besides “stay the course” (which you may recall, didn’t work for George H.W. Bush in 1992).

As I keep trying to tell people, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. It is true that Trump won because enough voters really are that Goddamn STUPID. It is also true that Gary Johnson also ran in 2012 and was not a factor against Barack Obama’s victory, that Obama won two elections against respected Republicans McCain and Romney (despite being a biracial Commie Muslim), and that if your opponent is less intelligent and less handsome than Charles II of Spain, and you can’t convince enough people in enough states that you would make a better president than him, You. Have. FAILED as a candidate.

But even beyond all that, it’s more of an existential issue. Americans are just getting sick of it all. Sick of this bureaucratic, technological society. The “American dream” of decent living standards is getting harder to come by. We have to have more and more qualifications to get jobs that pay less and less. Health insurance, whether employer-based or the ACA, is becoming more and more of a hassle. Streets and shops are more and more crowded. Every telephone service is being run on answering machines and call centers. Bluntly, Americans want a Zombie Apocalypse. They want a Zombie Apocalypse and the related population die-off and technological collapse to set existence back to basics. But since zombies are scientifically impossible, voting for Trump is the next best thing.

Or, there’s another way to look at it.

You might remember that in 2012, after Mitt Romney lost a presidential run to incumbent Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee commissioned a “growth and opportunity project” –  more commonly referred to in the press as their post-election “autopsy” – in which the feedback they got in surveys, focus groups and other methods indicated that the GOP was faulty at “messaging”, that young people in particular “are rolling their eyes at what the Party represents” and “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” The proposed solution was for the party to “stop talking to itself,” basically meaning outreach to other people who don’t already agree with the doctrinaire Republican position, as opposed to catering to the stupid bigots fortified by talk radio and alternative media. And the response from the “base” and Republican organizers in the 2014 midterms was “we SHOULD TOO cater to the stupid bigots, because they’re the ones who show up and VOTE, and vote for the hardcore conservatives who fight for us.”

That’s what you had with the Tea Party after Obama was elected, and that’s why Republicans took back both houses of Congress from Democrats. But it still wasn’t enough to win against Barack Obama in the national elections of 2008 and 2012. What Republicans needed to compete on a national level was a leader who represented what they truly believed, a politician who did not project contempt for his “base” but actually embraced and encouraged their stupidity and vulgarity. And then Donald Trump ran for President.

Now, as with the Romney Autopsy, Democrats ought to do the opposite of what they’re being told. That doesn’t mean they should nominate another dull party hack who has no grasp of the victory conditions for a presidential election. It also doesn’t mean you should emulate Republican psychology. You will never top Republicans when it comes to tribal, us-versus-them, persecution-complex, “the only way to stop Satan is to self-lobotomize and vote for the lesser asshole” mentality, and if you try, you will defeat the purpose of claiming to be different from them. But you can learn what they learned from their defeat: First, find the people who will vote for you no matter what, and cater to them. Second, wait for their leader to show up.

Republicans:

You can say that Americans voted for Trump because they were sick of leftist political correctness. You can say that people were tired of losing in the economy and being weak on foreign policy.

The fact is that America, led by the Republicans, has committed a strategic mistake somewhere between invading Russia without winter supplies and producing a Metallica album with no Kirk Hammett solos on it.

This is not the same as the liberals’ previous nightmare scenario in 2000, because while Bush Junior was a dunce and an ideologue, he could at least do outreach to other people. Trump is that much more “my way or the highway” than Bush, and that much more allergic to concepts like “humility”, “foresight” and “learning.” I did not vote for Bush. Either time. I did not agree with most of his policies. But contrary to liberal opinion, he WON Florida, and the 2000 election, and I spoke out against “Bush Derangement Syndrome” and liberals who spouted things like “He’s Not My President.” But then, Bush wasn’t a walking conflict of interest who had his head so far up Vladimir Putin’s ass that it turned his face a non-Caucasian skin color. If Trump’s administration turns out to be only AS bad as Bush’s, it will be a damn miracle.

When Trump’s presidency blows up in your faces like a badly-timed money shot – and with Trump’s temperament, that is a When, NOT If – you are creating a danger that America will end up a one-party state. That one party being the Democrats. Because depending on exactly how things play out, they may get the public support needed to outlaw Republican Party membership as being either associated with treason or as medical evidence of subnormal intelligence.

This isn’t really advice, since, as with the Democrats, I think you’re too stubborn and stupid to take it. I just wanted this on record so that in the aftermath I can quote your prophet and go “See, I Told You So.”

Because if there’s one thing your party has in common with Democrats, it is an overbearing and completely undeserved level of vanity. Specifically, the notion that you will have a permanent majority despite history telling you it never lasts. This is why both parties pass laws to strengthen government on the assumption that they will be able to permanently remake society in their image, only to have all that power given over to their enemies, because people only need eight years or less to get sick of you running things. You should have learned that much from Bush. Of course, you get away with this thinking precisely because the only alternative to one party is to elect the other disagreeable party to the majority, and all Party A has to do is wait for people to get sick of Party B. Then vice versa. There is only one way out of this trap, and that leads to-

Libertarians: The Libertarian Party did not achieve its goal of getting 5 percent of the vote this election, which would have qualified them for federal campaign support (which for Libertarians in particular is a very contradictory goal). It did however achieve 4 million votes, which was the highest vote total for a third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1996. The Libertarian Party is now the first party other than the Democrats and Republicans to have 500,000 registered members. The fact that the LP achieved this despite the numerous gaffes of candidate Gary Johnson and the tacit support of Hillary Clinton from Johnson’s running mate William Weld indicates that the audience for (L)ibertarian ideas is growing. More broadly, given that about 45% of American voters did not turn out at all, and when two-party politics is based on the premise that “you MUST vote for Candidate A, no matter how rotten they are, because if Candidate B is elected, the world will go to Hell”, and there was more objective evidence for that belief than ever, the fact that Candidate B got elected anyway was, I think, a case of the American electorate calling the political system’s bluff.

However, the trap that the duopoly has placed us in is that either A or B is going to get elected, so the only way to get rid of one party is to replace it with the other, no matter how bad IT is. The only way to really call the bluff is to have a credible alternative in place versus A and B. And in 2016, the Libertarians and other “third” parties were clearly not ready. My advice to them:

As I have said, you need to have a plan for what you would do on Day One, as opposed to being like the Republicans who kept going on for years and years about how they were going to “repeal AND replace” Obamacare, and now that they are in position to DO so, have no plan for a transition besides “your diabetic aunt dies for lack of coverage.”

The Affordable Care Act is also a case study in whether Libertarians can make a proactive case for their philosophy towards government. Even some liberals are willing to admit that the ACA is flawed at least in execution. But the reason it passed in the first place is because it met a demand. If a public demand is not met by the private sector, THAT’s how you get socialized medicine. If there is a better service than the ACA available through the private sector, Libertarians need to promote that. If there IS no such service, Libertarians need to admit that, and look at what we have.

Needless to say, the same auditing process applies to other issues.

Of course in order to be in that position, you need to have representatives in office, not only in a presidential year but in the midterms and the years between. However tempted one may be to think the president can make all the difference, especially with Trump being an outlier in his own party, he still needed a popular and organized party to win, and he needed a base in Congress to make that win count for something. The need for downballot candidates is that much more critical for one reason that became clear in the 2016 election: “ticket splitting” is more rare than ever. And when you don’t even field candidates in a lot of districts, it makes it that much less likely that people will see the point of electing your presidential nominee. So “third” parties need to admit that you need to elect Congresscritters first to get a president, not the other way around. (Incidentally, Democrats: that advice goes for you, too.)

Nevertheless, the Party will need a presidential candidate for the sake of symbolism and the representation of the Libertarian platform on a national level, along with the strong possibility that the 2020 duopoly candidates will be even worse than they were this election. So we have to consider what we need in light of what we learned with Gary Johnson- namely, that the media will focus on a “third” party candidate only for purposes of tearing them down. The party nominee has to be ready for that, and to present their case through “the enemy” without antagonizing too many people by overtly treating the press as the enemy. The nominee has to be someone who is articulate not only on libertarian philosophy but philosophy in general. Someone who doesn’t freeze in the headlights when confronted with a question. The nominee has to be someone who is capable of defending libertarianism and the party platform, but with a good sense of humor. And that means the person nominated has to be somebody who is already media-savvy and with experience in talking to journalists about libertarianism, someone who already has a strong public presence.

I am seriously thinking we should draft Penn Jillette to be the Libertarian Party nominee for President in 2020.

I mean, Penn actually was IN Celebrity Apprentice, and apparently that’s all the qualification you need these days.

“It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear. “

-Ayn Rand, 1962

“Keep your lies consistent.”

-Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #60

Since The Election, Donald Trump has been not quite as boorish as I expected, but still basically true to form.  Most recently he’s twitted that anybody who burns the flag needs to have their citizenship revoked. Most likely to distract from recent accusations that his son-in-law has conflict of interest problems.  Or, to rally all those people who got bent out of shape when liberals did mass street protests against Trump’s victory. I mean, look at it this way: When the Left gets angry, they go en masse into the streets, protest, and kick stuff over. When the Right gets angry, they go en masse into the polls and elect Donald Trump. Over the next four years, it remains to be seen which temper tantrum will cause more property damage and disruption of human life.

Because that’s what this amounted to. Half of the recent distrust of Hillary Clinton was her vague to non-existent defense on her lack of email and phone security as Secretary of State. But it turns out that Trump as president-elect has carried out a phone conversation (on a non-secured line) with the president of Argentina, a conversation that Ivanka Trump was also privy to.  Did all the Trump voters who wanted a cleaner Washington really think that Trump, with his declared reputation for shady dealing, was going to be cleaner than the Clintons?

All you Bible-thumpers, did you really believe Trump when he said his favorite New Testament book was “Two Corinthians”?

Did you really believe Trump when you said he was an outsider? That he would drain the swamp?  Do you believe him now when he nominates Goldman Sachs veteran Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, and is entertaining both David “Actually Gave Out Classified Information” Petraeus and Mitt Romney, the ultimate flip-flopper, as Secretary of State? Did you believe that Trump was going to staff Washington with outsiders, when all of his nominees are veterans of the system- because they know Washington, and he doesn’t?

Did you really believe him? No. Of course not.

I have joked that if Donald Trump could get the endorsement of both David Duke and Sheldon Adelson, that’s a pretty big tent.

It’s not really a joke. In fact, this point is at the core of the cognitive dissonance required to be a Trump voter.

Adelson is an arch-Zionist. Duke is an arch-anti-Semite. Trump CANNOT want what they both want. Either he is lying to one of them, or at least one of them is lying to himself about Trump. That is what it takes to support Trump. You have to convince yourself “Oh, he won’t do that crazy thing” (that someone else wants him to do) but he WILL do that crazy thing that YOU want him to do.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes. A pompous, stupid Emperor gets fleeced by a con artist who sells him weightless, invisible clothing which is “magic” and can only be seen by those who are “virtuous.” Well, the Emperor doesn’t want to admit he isn’t virtuous, so he takes the deal for non-clothing. And because he’s the Emperor, everyone around him has to go along with the deal. And they all have to exaggerate how wonderful his clothing looks. Until he goes out on parade showing his naked ass, and an innocent child (whom no one could accuse of being unvirtuous) says, “But he’s got nothing on!”

Well, this point in history is kind of the opposite of that. The Emperor’s subjects had to go along with the scam as long as they did BECAUSE he was the Emperor, and could cut off their heads if they didn’t agree with him. Trump started out with wealth and prestige, but he wasn’t the Emperor. We, The People gave him the power to cut off heads because we looked at his lumpy, naked ass and declared he was wearing the most sumptuous clothing, and no amount of evidence would convince us otherwise.

The fact is, that you, the Trumpets, want to be lied to. There is no better way to put it.

You want to be lied to.

You would just prefer to be whipped and beaten by a Liar-in-Chief with an “R” next to his name instead of a “D.” Well, Trumpets, you are about to learn the same lesson as Chris Christie: In politics, there is no such thing as topping from the bottom. And all you liberals who wonder why I have a problem with Big Government- you’re about to find out.

I have tried to come up with some way of getting across exactly how moronic and counterproductive and anti-reason the Trump vote was, and then the analogy hit me. Boy, did it hit me.

A few days back, just before Thanksgiving, I had to save money until payday, I didn’t have much in the cupboard, but I still had some leftover lasagna from a family dinner at an Italian restaurant and I figured I could eat that after work. I mean, I hadn’t gotten around to eating it for about… seven days… after I took it home, but there wasn’t much of it, and it didn’t look bad… I figured, “what’s the worst that could happen?”

And on the same night, I had a bottle of a prescription antibiotic that my dentist had prescribed in order to treat gum infection, prior to him doing an extraction. I was feeling a little bad the week before, just before the Italian dinner, so I temporarily quit the antibiotic. I looked it up on the Internet, and the potential side effects include (among others I did not experience) chills, difficulty with breathing, difficulty with swallowing, general body swelling, increased thirst, itching, nausea, rash, and shortness of breath. So I had not taken the antibiotic for a week, and was feeling better, but I still had at least another week before the dental appointment, and I wasn’t quite sure that I had gotten side effects from the prescription or whether I was just affected by a change in the weather, and I wanted to make sure the prescription wasn’t the cause of my illness. Only one capsule. At the same time as the lasagna. I figured, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Well- ladies and gentlemen, after two solid hours of projectile vomiting from my diaphragm while leaking liquid fire out of my anus, I can tell you EXACTLY what the worst was that could happen.

Now, you the reader, may look at this account, and think: “James. What. The. Fuck. Do you have no sense? Were you not capable of making judgments from previous data? Did you HAVE to learn this lesson the hard way?

“Wasn’t your choice REMARKABLY STUPID?“

Well yes. Yes it was. Remarkably stupid.

I still feel okay in that my catastrophic fuckups in life only affect me and do not inflict collateral damage on my entire country and its position in the world.

Yes, I did vote for Gary Johnson. I have gone into great detail in explaining why. I have also said that if one is thinking of going third-party that one must think strategically.  I felt safe in voting third-party in Nevada because Nevada is basically two states: the Democratic-to-independent Greater Las Vegas area versus Cliven Bundy Land,  and the votes of the former usually drown out the latter. That was not the case in other “swing” states. I also said that if one cannot transcend binary thinking, or if polling in one’s state was that close, that an establishment politician with Machiavellian survival skills was still a better steward of the nuclear codes than a spoiled little rich boy who doesn’t know which end of the fork to use.

Yes, I did not vote for Hillary Clinton. I have gone into great detail as to why she was a bad candidate, for reasons having nothing to do with her emails (although I plan to address that subject in a future post). But if the two major candidates, and even the third and fourth candidates, were not worth supporting, that does not justify actively endorsing the worst of them. Put it this way: if all the people who voted against Hillary Clinton had voted for Hillary Clinton- we would have President Hillary Clinton. And as P.J. O’Rourke put it, “she would be a terrible president, but she would be terrible on conventional standards.” If all the people who voted against Hillary had voted for Gary Johnson, most likely we would have President Gary Johnson. The worst-case scenario there is IF he overcame Democratic AND Republican opposition, Johnson would have crafted a policy agenda that would horrify “progressives,” but he would not be a sexist, he would not be a racist, and he would not be a blithering idiot. Well, okay, he might be a blithering idiot, but he would not be a sexist and racist. But the vast majority of people who voted against Clinton voted for Trump, so the scenario now is a sexist AND racist AND blithering idiot WITH the lockstep support of the majority party.

And all because so many took to heart something Trump kept saying on the campaign trail, ostensibly as an appeal to blacks and Hispanics in “terrible” neighborhoods, but really intended to white people in terrible neighborhoods: “What have you got to lose?”

What have you got to lose? Like, what did I have to lose by not eating rancid lasagna and risking a pharmaceutical allergy? Well, I could have lost the agony and physical exhaustion of autofire Bazooka blasting from both ends of my digestive tract. But that was two hours. You Trumpets decided to inflict the political equivalent of that experience on yourselves and the rest of the country for four years. And you had A LOT more fair warning than I did.

You done fucked up.

So now the last step between the current status quo and Orange Julius Caesar is the actual vote of the Electoral College on December 19, and the hope that some “faithless electors” will prevent the formality of Trump’s election. This week one of those Republican Texas electors, Art Sisneros, announced that he could not vote for Trump, but rather than “vote his conscience” (as Ted Cruz might ask him to do) he decided to withdraw from his position, presumably so that the Republicans could fill the position with someone who will make the choice he opposes. He explained his decision, sort of, in a blog post, and however self-righteous, Christian and hand-wringing his position is, he does explain why it is unlikely that the Electoral College will actually perform its regulatory function in the system: “The Electoral College was corrupted from its original intent once states started dictating the votes of the Electors.  The two biggest aggressors to the original system were from political parties and the switch to winner-take-all states. The rise of political parties, as George Washington prophetically predicted, [in his Farewell Address] has had a “baneful effect” on our nation. …Originally Electors were free from political parties and their pledges. What mattered most was the character and qualifications of the candidate, not the viability of their path to victory (primaries) or the team that any candidate represented. The Electors were also free from these statewide popular vote contests that run all but two states today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Breakdown_and_revision “When James Madison and Hamilton, two of the most important architects of the Electoral College, saw this strategy [statewide popular vote] being taken by some states, they protested strongly. Madison and Hamilton both made it clear this approach violated the spirit of the Constitution. Hamilton considered a pre-pledged elector to violate the spirit of Article II of the Constitution insofar as such electors could make no ‘analysis’ or ‘deliberate’ concerning the candidates. Madison agreed entirely, saying that when the Constitution was written, all of its authors assumed individual electors would be elected in their districts and it was inconceivable a ‘general ticket’ of electors dictated by a state would supplant the concept. Madison wrote, ‘The district mode was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted; & was exchanged for the general ticket.”
And thus it becomes more clear that the real Original Sin of the constitutional system was not the tolerance of slavery, as poisonous as that was. The fundamental flaw was that the Founders recognized that party politics was a major liability in the old British system, but they considered it to be an aberration that they would deliberately avoid rather than a political default, and put no thought into countering or balancing such partisanship in the system. And thus we are where we are now.

Where we are now is that the Electoral College, which was intended as a safeguard against the common people electing a downright moron, is now the mechanism being used to engineer that result. Which is why I am starting to agree with those who want to get rid of it. I am not entirely on board with such an idea, because we still have the matter that if the presidential election is simply a national popularity contest, the political-media complex will be that much more fixated on New York, Florida and California than it is now. I had made a similar point to a liberal Facebook friend who told me, (if I recall correctly) “if the ‘red’ states are being overtaken in population and the majority vote is now on the coasts, I don’t see why that’s not fair.”

I responded: “Ask the people who are being overtaken.”

In that regard, one could say that this Electoral College result is the response of flyover country to the sentiment of “screw you peasants as long as the Dow Jones is up.”

It could be said that this Electoral College result is the response of flyover country to the establishment position of “0.5 percent job growth IS an economic recovery, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.”

But- when there were at least two other alternatives to the Democratic agenda, it is also true that this Electoral College result means that Donald Trump gained the brand-name reputation of the other major party, not to mention the legitimacy provided by free media, and used that reputation to present himself as even more of a lying sack of shit than Hillary Clinton, overtly bigoted, that much more eager to go to the gutter, reflexively positioning himself to the lowest common denominator, and enough voters, in enough states, were okay with taking such evil in a package deal, insofar as they were not actively endorsing it.

Because if Trump had won the popular vote but Hillary Clinton got elected anyway through an Electoral College majority, the trappings of the Republic would be saved, but the implications for democracy would be that much more dire. As it stands, I consider that the last time America asked itself the question, “do we want a minority of belligerent rednecks to reverse the course of our nation?” we ended up fighting a civil war, and decided that the answer was “NO.”

 

To: Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the Libertarian Party

Subject: Another Idea for the LP Store

Hi Wes,

I had written to you shortly before the election saying that the LP should start selling T-Shirts and bumper stickers saying “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Gary Johnson.”  I had cause to regret that immediately after the election when it became clear that the margin of voters who voted for Johnson in certain states could have won the election for Clinton.  I calmed down once everyone on social media had vented and come to the realization that if the choice was between X and Donald Trump and Donald Trump had at least an even chance of winning, then the race was already lost.  Even so, “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted Libertarian” seems like it would best appeal to the Nicholas Sarwark contingent that just wants to make liberals cry.  Mind you, if ticking off liberals was the only thing that mattered about voting, Donald Trump WOULD have gotten a popular vote majority.

So while “Don’t Blame Me” is still a good idea, I think I have an even better one.

I’m sure you’ve seen this picture:

We should sell this with the caption: “BE THIS GUY – VOTE LIBERTARIAN”

I think it would have more universal appeal, and be a more direct way of making the point.

Sincerely,

JAMES GILLEN