Political issues – Page 12

Beneath the tips of the iceberg

Jill Stein (1) and Michael Flynn (2) with Vladimir Putin (3), December 10, 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily post this morning on Facebook, is clear about the right-wing plan:

“Today’s invasion of democratic Ukraine by authoritarian Putin is important. It not only has broken a long period of peace in Europe, it has brought into the open that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.”

Richardson always chooses her words very carefully, aware that she is writing the first draft of history, and so “brought into the open” are the right words. It has been easy enough to identify, by connecting the dots, the most deadly struggle in the world today. That is the coordinated attempt by the kleptocratic global oligarchy to defeat democracy, to install corrupt right-wing governments everywhere possible, to reverse the post-World War II order, to keep oil billionaires rich for as long as possible, to subvert the rule of law to serve kleptocracy while using the law and the prisons against the opposition, and to force as many people as possible to live in right-wing police states, slaving for as little pay as possible, without social safety nets, to make the rich richer. Not only is it clear now what they are trying to do, it’s also clear who is on which side.

The installation of Donald Trump in the White House and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are features of the same plan. Yes, Putin meddled in the 2016 election. Yes, Trump has some sort of connection to Russia or Russian money that we still don’t know about. Many of the agents of the oligarchy have been exposed, for example Michael Flynn, who actually became Trump’s National Security Advisor. As Wikipedia mentions, “Flynn suggested the president should suspend the Constitution, silence the press, and hold a new election under military authority.” Just what Putin wanted.

It’s all of a piece, all part of the same plan. Though Trump failed to retain power long enough to back Putin’s military moves toward the west, Trump succeeded spectactularly at making the Republican Party part of the fascist project and educating susceptible Americans as fascists. The American systems of right-wing propaganda and Putin’s propaganda were aligned, leveraged by the malevolent use of technology. Just imagine how much more hopeless the global situation would be today if Trump were still in power, if the United States supported Russia’s military moves against democracy, if Trump was still in a position to strangle NATO, and if Americans were still being propagandized by a Trump White House.

There is still much that we don’t know, of course. The full extent of Trump’s criminality and treason is not yet known. The full details of the global plan to destroy democracy are not yet known by the public, though no doubt the Jan. 6 committee in the U.S. House of Representatives will reveal a great deal in its hearings this year. One of the elements of the plan that continues to puzzle me, though, is how some left-wing extremists came to be a part of it. I am thinking of the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and of so-called journalists — but actually propagandists and conspirators — such as Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange.

Who knows what Putin still has up his sleeve. But the invasion of Ukraine, I suspect (and hope) was a Hail Mary move. If Trump were still installed in the White House, then crushing Ukraine would have been a cakewalk. Putin is said to be a gambler and a risk-taker. The odds for Putin may look poor at the moment, with the United States and NATO up against him. Nevertheless, many people will die, and the economic destruction will be felt around the world. I am not the first to say it by any means, but it’s worth repeating: We are all Ukrainians now.

The academic left

Those of us who identify with the left are, to a remarkable degree, intellectually on our own. We read a lot, certainly, including the output of liberal and even leftist pundits. We may be members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, but the Democratic coalition includes a broad range of political interests, and thus the party makes no effort to tell us what to think. A few months ago I was wondering: Is there any publication that is smart enough and wise enough to make being a leftist a little less lonely? I had subscribed to The Nation for a while, but I quickly grew tired of its low-information, often strident, and heat-of-the-moment articles. I don’t even check their web site anymore. The biggest portion of political commentary (or propaganda, if you wish), both on the left and the right, is aimed at feeding our anger for the purpose of keeping us engaged.

We leftists are certainly capable of forming our own opinions about the train of daily political dramas. We can reason from our moral and political values (fairness, justice, caring, equality). And we may subscribe to well developed philosophical theories (for me that would be John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice). But each of us has limited knowledge, and taking a strong position on a particular issue had best be done with a reasonably good knowledge of that issue. That is the great weakness of the professional punditry. Day after day, though they are experts on nothing, they have to keep cranking it out. Members of think tanks (such as the Brookings Institution) can do a somewhat better job, because they are expected to spend some time on research, and they have areas of expertise. If you follow a serious magazine such as The Atlantic (which is not a leftist magazine by any means), you may find that the weakest articles are written by the staff (who are cranking it out), and the strongest articles are written by people who write only about subjects where they have some expertise and have done the research.

So then, what if there was a magazine with a staff of only four (and thus with no one cranking out articles), a magazine in which all the articles are written by the leading academics in a given area — people whose profession is not punditry but research and expertise. Dissent magazine is that type of magazine.

That I was not familiar with Dissent magazine and had to go looking for it is not terribly embarrassing. Its circulation is only about 5,000, maybe less. I think it would be safe to say that it is an elite publication. It is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It’s a quarterly, with a subscription price of $30 a year. The magazine was founded in 1954. It has a history of punching above its weight, if you measure the weight by the number of subscribers. When Dissent observed its 60th birthday in 2013, there were flattering articles: “A Lion of the Left Wing Celebrates Six Decades“, in the New York Times; and “A Modest Utopia: Sixty Years of Dissent,” by George Packer in the New Yorker. If you are a leftist, you will not be embarrassed by having a copy of it seen on your desk.

The caricature of leftist academic writing and thinking is that it’s opaque and loaded down with postmodern jargon, with a lingering Marxist fetish. With Dissent magazine that is not the case. The focus of the winter 2022 issue is “Beyond Bidenomics.” Except for an article on the Chilean economy, “The End of Neoliberalism in Chile?”, I read it cover to cover. There are advantages, I think, for a quarterly publication: altitude, enough altitude to provide some perspective and to stand clear of the daily media circus. Even monthly publications have to do some cranking. And I suspect that one reason for the narcissistic vacuousness of the way-overrated New Yorker is that the New Yorker has to crank that stuff out once a week.

You can check on Dissent magazine on its web site.

New York Times v. Palin (updated at end)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It’s easy to see what right-wingers are up to here. They want a lower court decision that they can take to the U.S. Supreme Court so that the Supreme Court can change the legal standard used in libel cases, thereby clamping down on the First Amendment. Then, as the right-wing mind sees it, right-wing politicians would be able to sue the pants off the liberal media every other day and win. As they see it, right-wing propagandists with their right-wing alternate reality would then have complete control of the media landscape, and the liberal media would be intimidated into kissing the behinds of lying right-wing politicians even more than they already do. But they are delusional.

This subject may seem a little dull for those who — unlike me — didn’t spend their career inside newspaper newsrooms. But this is very important, and we all need to pay attention as it plays out. There’s a good chance that the Supreme Court may give them what they want.

First, I’d suggest reading a piece in today’s Washington Post. A law professor from the University of Chicago writes about a movement that supports undoing the 1964 libel case that set the legal standard used in deciding libel cases. The piece is “Is the legal standard for libel outdated? Sarah Palin could help answer.”

It’s important to keep in mind that the legal standard of “actual malice” in New York Times v. Sullivan applies only to public figures. Because of New York Times v. Sullivan, it is much more difficult to win a libel case against a public figure than against a person who stays at home and minds his own business. (All politicians are public figures.) The idea behind this standard, especially in light of the First Amendment, is that in the United States we want — and that the Founding Fathers intended — an open and robust public discussion of public affairs, with no one able to restrict what others say or intimidate others into silence on matters of public importance. The reason Fox News wasn’t sued into the dirt twenty years ago for its constant lies and defamations is — you guessed it — New York Times v. Sullivan. We tolerated the lies, slanders, and alternate reality of Fox News on account of a matter of principle as well as settled law — the open and robust discussion of public affairs.

But, as in all things, right-wingers are delusional. If the Supreme Court makes it easier for politicians to win libel suits against the news media, then right-wing politicians may occasionally win one, because the responsible media do sometimes make mistakes. But it is the right-wing media that lie and slander constantly, intentionally, and with impunity under New York Times v. Sullivan. With the “actual malice” standard gone, the only standards remaining would be truth and proof of harm. Right-wingers seem to believe their own lies. They also seem to believe the lies they tell about Democrats and liberals. So they are blind to what would happen, simply because courts — unlike right-wing minds — are able to sort out truth from lies. That’s why right-wingers got laughed out of court after court with their lawsuits claiming that Biden stole the 2020 election. If New York Times v. Sullivan goes down, try accusing Hillary Clinton of eating children and see what happens.

For all I know, there may be some reasonable arguments in favor of a new American standard of libel against public figures. But if that standard changes, we’d better look out for the consequences — a tsunami of lawsuits that would throw the American media landscape into chaos and put many financially marginal news operations (and bloggers!) out of business. Only rich news organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post would be able to afford to defend themselves against malicious lawsuits, and even they would be confused and cowed. The use of the word “malice” in New York Times v. Sullivan is ironic, because overturning the “actual malice” standard would clog the courts with malicious lawsuits against the media.

But the first victims of the chaos, and the first media operations to go down in flames, simply because their entire operations are based on lies and defamation, would be Fox News and the lesser network of right-wing propaganda operations.

Part of what is so dangerous and disgusting about the right-wing mind (Trump is a prime example) is that they see themselves as above the law. For them, as in the places they admire such as Russia and Hungary, the law is a tool to be used against their political enemies. That is their intent here, and they’ve been working at it for years. But abusing the courts is not yet possible in the United States. Our courts still function in spite of (as in responsible newsrooms) occasional errors.

If the Supreme Court changes the legal standard in libel cases, then right-wing know-nothings had better brace themselves for the mother of all blowbacks and a nuclear-scale backfire straight into their miserable faces. Those of us who care about truth and fairness would finally have a way of making them pay for their lies by sueing them into the dirt.

Update: Andrew Rice, in New York magazine, makes the same case as I make here: If Sarah Palin Wins, Fox News Could Lose. I would add to that, though, that losing and appealing the case to the Supreme Court may be the plan.

My guess is they’ll flee the country

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I have never bought into the belief that Trump always skates, no matter what the crime. Yes, for many years in his New York City days he was able to stay a step ahead of the law (and his creditors). And yes, once he was installed in the White House with a corrupted Justice Department, and with Republicans in Congress either in league with him or terrorized by him, he was temporarily untouchable. One of the reasons why authoritarian strongmen are desperate to stay in power is that, once they are forced out of office, they are quite likely to be rung up for their crimes.¹ If Trump had remained in New York as just another con man, he probably would have kept on skating. That is now impossible. Though Republicans have paralyzed America’s political system where they were unable to corrupt it, America’s court system is still functioning, having survived Republicans’ desperate attempts to Russianize it. Judges that Trump appointed have consistently ruled against him, and only one member of the Supreme Court, the odious Clarence Thomas, is willing to pervert the law and the facts to protect Trump. (Thomas’s wife supported the Jan. 6 rally, though I’ve not heard of any evidence that she did anything illegal.) Republican judges can get away with cheating only when things are close or contestable. Trump’s crimes are blatant and are being thoroughly exposed.

I have been saying for a long time that Trump is going to prison. I’ve been accused of being wrong. But I should have said that there was never any chance of Trump being brought to justice while he still had the powers of the presidency. The process of bringing Trump to justice is agonizingly slow, but in the last year much progress has been made, despite the efforts of Trump and Republicans to stand in the way of the law.

Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate, has a pretty good article listing Trump’s most recent failures to evade the law. The piece is Donald Trump Had a Truly Terrible Week. She writes, “Donald Trump has kept the walls at bay, long before he ran for office, by undermining, buying off, out-waiting, and intimidating the justice system. Once he took office, he made the best efforts of any president to buy and sell judges and justices, to bully his attorneys general, and to bluster his way to a lifetime of legal immunity. When you no longer have any authority over the judges, and the prosecutors, and the law enforcement officers, it’s at least no longer possible to simply make the walls just go away.”

The mainstream media can’t just say that Trump is going to prison. They have to hedge, as Lithwick does, by saying that “the walls are closing in,” or that the Trumps face “substantial legal jeopardy.” The mainstream media can rarely print everything they know. And, unfortunately, keeping liberals terrified that Trump will get away with it all, and that he wants back into the White House, is good for ratings.

Those who fear that Trump always skates have many worries. For example, what if Republicans take the House in the midterm elections and shut down the Jan. 6 committee? That wouldn’t matter, because the Jan. 6 committee will have finished its work by then. At that point, the Justice Department will take over investigating and prosecuting Trump’s crimes. Republicans have no chance of interfering with the Justice Department again until January 2025. New York will put Trump and his brats in prison no matter what happens in Georgia, or at the federal level. Trump is doomed. Some of his assets in New York will be seized. We will find out who the Trumps’ creditors are. The truth about Trump taxes will come out in court. There is not the slightest chance that Trump (or Don Jr. or Ivanka) will ever get inside the White House again.

So what will the Trumps do? Much has been written about whether they will flee the country and where they might go. It wouldn’t be easy being fugitives from U.S. justice. They would not be able to travel to any country where they’d be arrested and extradited back to the United States. It would cramp their jet-set lifestyle severely, but there certainly are countries that would take them in — Russia, for example, or Saudi Arabia. They’re no longer welcome in Europe anyway. Europe hates the Trumps as much as do those Americans (a slim majority) who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid. Kushner, we know, is trying to get a piece of the at least $500 billion in the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

In any case, it seems obvious to me that the Trumps are going to prison — unless they leave the country. Whether they’re going to prison is no longer even an interesting question, as I see it. The interesting question now is: What will they do to try to stay out of prison? After all, they already have tried to overthrow the U.S. government to try to stay out of prison. They have the means of fleeing the country, certainly. The Trumps’ Boeing 757 is reported to be in Louisiana right now, having its engines repaired and getting a new paint job. Trump has said he wants to fly it to rallies, painted to look like Air Force 1. My guess, though, is that he’s more likely to sell the jet because he needs the money. It would be much smarter to sneak out of the country in the dead of night on board the plane of one of the Trumps’ billionaire oligarch friends from Russia or the oil countries. Can you imagine Ivanka Trump or Jared Kushner allowing themselves to be handcuffed and taken to jail, where the toilets are not gold? I can’t. They’ll go somewhere posh in the oligarch world where they can continue to live it up, live out their prince and princess fantasies, and run their grifting operations. This gauche palace on the Black Sea sounds just right for Jared and Ivanka. I can easily imagine the Trumps tricking their Secret Service security and running off to an airport. But that would be much easier (and cheaper) to pull off if they do it before they are indicted and a court sets bail. Another smart and Trumpish plan, since there is nothing to stop them from traveling outside the country at present, would be to go somewhere claiming to be on vacation, and then refuse to return to the U.S., claiming that they require asylum because they are victims of a partisan witch-hunt out to get them in the U.S. My guess is that Fox News would be happy to go along with that.

In any case, we liberals need to stop worrying that the Trumps are going to get away with everything. That’s not going to happen. Their crimes are too extreme and too well documented. The Trumps may beat some of the charges, but they can’t beat them all. It has been obvious to reasonable people, for a long time, what the Trumps’ crimes are, and as the investigations of those crimes continue, those crimes are much uglier than we suspected even a year ago. They left a clear trail of evidence. The coup attempt, it seems, was a Hail Mary move, their only hope. Professional propagandists such as Sean Hannity understood that Trump was cutting his own throat, as was revealed by Hannity’s texts to the White House, “No more stolen election talk.” Hannity is smart. The Trumps are dumb as rocks. We have consistently underestimated, not overestimated, the Trumps’ criminality. At this stage, we’re waiting for investigators and prosecutors to build the airtight cases that will be needed to assure convictions when the cases go to court. The Trumps will use their usual tactics to try to pervert justice and declare themselves vindicated.

We’re not quite at the popcorn stage — perp walks, courtroom drama, or waking up some morning to the news that the Trumps have surfaced in some gaudy palace on the Black Sea. But we’re getting there. We might want to stock up on Orville Redenbacher’s best before the shelves are empty at the grocery store.

One huge challenge lies ahead, even after the Trumps are convicted. That is explaining to the American people the extent of the Trumps’ decades of crime and the sheer evil of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 election with a coup, accusing Democrats, as always, of what they themselves are doing. Historians will have the full story. But if the average American hears the full story, some help from Hollywood is going to be needed. One of the most fascinating popcorn events yet to come will be watching how Fox News will create an alternate reality around the fall of the House of Trump, with years of Fox’s lies exposed. When will Republicans cut and run? What new lies will they invent, and who will fall for them next time? That’s the catch, I’m afraid. At least 35 percent of the American population will continue to be idiots begging to be deceived. It’s entertaining to imagine Russia taking in about 35 million “patriot” Americans and giving them nice rural homes in Siberia where they can continue to serve Putin. But the reality is that, after the Trumps are gone, new con men will move in with fresh ways of bamboozling, bilking, and enraging the Fox-watching patriot hordes. I have little hope that the Republican Party actually will reform itself, though Republicans such as Liz Cheney will try.

Notes:

1. Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know. Erica Frantz, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Falling apart at the seams??

David Brooks has an important — but very misleading — column this morning at the New York Times, “America is falling apart at the seams.” The column tries to pull off the same old deception that so-called centrists always try to pull off. That’s the idea that bad things are always symmetrical, that “both sides” are always equally to blame.

It’s not that America is falling apart at the seams. It’s that Republican, Trumpist America is falling apart at the seams. Republicans are well along in becoming what Republican propaganda and Trumpist trash-talk have taught them to become — insufferable.

Show me someone assaulting airline crew and I will show you a white Republican. Show me someone being rude and demeaning to a waitress and I will show you a white Republican.

Brooks tries to blame the usual conservative boogey men. He mentions that a majority of Americans are no longer members of a church. Small wonder, given that the white churches have driven away decent people, having aligned their religion with Trump and Republican politics. The decline in church membership actually is a sign of moral improvement in American society, given what the churches have become.

Every liberal I know is working extra hard to preserve civility, even though we are often the targets of “fuck your feelings” incivility. A few months ago, a drunk Republican who lives about half a mile away from me threatened to kill me after he saw that the mighty right-wing talking points that he was shouting at me weren’t having the effect he wanted. He had a 9mm pistol in his back pocket. He shouted the N-word several times just to show that he wasn’t “woke.” His intent was intimidation. Trumpist America wants the rest of America to be afraid of them. I told him, and not in a snowflake voice, to stop trying to intimidate me.

David Brooks’ self-deceived, centrist, both-sides hand-wringing will do no good, not until the Republican Party rethinks its politics and the white churches rethink their religion. They hate being a minority, and they are terrified by the fact that it is becoming harder and harder for them to dominate.

Don’t Look Up

Don’t Look Up can be streamed on Netflix.

First, a hat tip to Ken, who alerted me that this movie is a must-watch. Ken also wrote about it on his blog.

I’m not as critical as Ken on the quality of Don’t Look Up. If there are flaws, I didn’t mind, other than that the movie is about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. It’s surgically accurate. And I rejoice because at last we’re heaping ridicule on Trump, Trumpism, and the millions of gullible and deplorable people who can’t see through Trump and who were willing to kill for Trump in the trenches of Trumpism. (Images from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are my evidence that I’m not exaggerating.)

A major — and overlooked — marker in deplorable people’s eagerness to deify Trump was when John Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015. Trevor Noah said that Stewart told him this about why he left The Daily Show:

“He said ‘I’m leaving because I’m tired.’ And he said, ‘I’m tired of being angry.’ And he said, ‘I’m angry all the time. I don’t find any of this funny. I do not know how to make it funny right now, and I don’t think the host of the show, I don’t think the show deserves a host who does not feel that it is funny.'”

It was in 2015 that we lost public ridicule as a defense against the rise of Trumpism. Finally, at the end of 2021, ridicule returns in Don’t Look Up. Stewart is right. There was nothing funny about Trump’s occupation of the White House. We were all angry, too angry to employ ridicule. Hand-wringers on the left told us that we should “reach out” to Trumpists and “try to understand them.” Wrong. We should have relentlessly ridiculed them.

I was curious about how the right-wing propagandists who feed Trumpism to the Trumpists would respond to Don’t Look Up. I think I found the answer in a review in The Washington Examiner, which boils down to, “Nothing to see here. Move along. Everyone knows it’s really the libs who are ridiculous.”

It is definitely not from the Democratic Party that the ridicule must come. President Biden and the Democrats in Congress understand that. The Democratic Party must stay focused on governing and working for the good of the American people. The ridicule is more a cultural than a political responsibility. Thank you, Hollywood. Television, where are you? More, please.

Two very good essays in the New York Times this morning are reminders that, though Trumpists eagerly embrace their own deception, the rest of us understand quite well what’s going on. The first is by Rebecca Solnit, “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies.” Solnit focuses on gullibility. The second is by Francis Fukuyama, who focuses on the world’s horror at what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

But understanding what happened is not enough to pull the American Democracy back from the brink. Those who broke the law to follow Trump must be brought to justice. And those who followed Trump but didn’t break the law must face public ridicule and public contempt so severe that they would be embarrassed to show their faces among decent people again for the rest of their lives.

Hidden Figures (the book)

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. Margot Lee Shetterly. HarperCollins, 2016. 348 pages.

Margot Lee Shetterly writes that, when she was working on this book, people repeatedly asked her why they had never heard this story before. There is a related question that I find very disturbing. What if this book had never been written? If it had not been written, then it’s entirely possible that these stories would have been lost to American history. That would have been a great tragedy. The book became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. The book was quickly followed by a movie with the same name, focusing on the story of Katherine Johnson.

I find this story fascinating for two reasons.

First there is the story of inequality and how hard some people have to struggle not only to develop the talent they were born with but also to find a way to have those talents recognized and put to use. Fiona Hill, whom Donald Trump called “the Russia bitch,” is a much more contemporary example. In Fiona Hill’s case, what held her back was the fact that she is a woman, and her provincial accent, which elites did not like. Katherine Johnson had even more obstacles to overcome. She was black, and her career began in the 1940s in a still-segregated United States.

Second there is the history of computers and how the history of computers ties in with the space race, the Cold War, the Apollo project, and the eventual creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This is the only book I’ve ever read that illustrates how numbers were crunched in the days before computers. Even before rockets, designing fast airplanes (including supersonic airplanes) required heavy number crunching. This work was done by teams of people with training in mathematics who did the computing work using mechanical calculators made by Monroe, Friden, and Marchant. These people were referred to as “computers.” I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that that’s why we call computers “computers” today. They were the machines that took the place of teams of human computers. The scientists and engineers who needed the early computers made by IBM were the same people who had relied on human teams of “computers.” They simply redirected the term.

Katherine Johnson died in 2020 at the age of 101. The author of this book of course interviewed Katherine Johnson, so the book includes her memories.

The stories of people such as Katherine Johnson and Fiona Hill are immensely inspiring. But there are two sides to that coin. Both Johnson and Hill earned their way up, but there also were lucky breaks and helpers along the way. That side of the coin is inspiring. But the other side is tragic. The tragedy is the many people — poor people without privilege — who never got the education they needed, never got a lucky break, and never had helpers. Hidden Figures and Fiona Hill’s There Is Nothing for You Here are powerful arguments for why all of us should join the struggle for equality of opportunity and economic and social justice. The right, including even the church, demonize the struggle for social justice and even have made an insult out of it — “social justice warrior.” This struggle is not over. Far from it.

Tit for tat

Gavin Newsome: payback as justice. Source: Wikipedia

Gavin Newsome, governor of California, deserves great credit for what may be the most inspired political tactic of the year. He slammed both right-wing Texas and the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court in a single move. Newsome will work with the California legislature to enact a law that allows private citizens to sue gun manufacturers. The law is to be modeled on the Texas law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers, a law which the U.S. Supreme Court so far has refused to strike down. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, has called for legislation in New York that would follow California’s lead.

Though “tit for tat” sounds petty and mean, it actually is an effective strategy in game theory. There also is the theory that it was tit for tat which, over time, led to the development of social cooperation and altruism. In tit for tat, you cooperate as long as your opponent cooperates. But if your opponent plays a dirty trick, then your next move is to strike back with an equivalent dirty trick. Both players stand to lose until cooperation resumes.

Are the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court hackish enough to tie themselves into knots to uphold the Texas law while overruling a California law? They may well be.

For decades, the United States was governable because norms were in place that fostered cooperation and fair play. But today the Republican Party has seen that its only means of getting and keeping power is to violate those norms. Thus political tit for tat, with smart countermoves like California’s, is now necessary.

Democrats have been infuriatingly slow to play hardball with extremist Republicans. The tit for tat should have started years ago, say, 1995. That was when Newt Gingrich, Republican speaker of the House, shut down the government in an attempt to get cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs. (Or was it because Clinton made Gingrich sit at the back of a plane?) President Clinton won that standoff. But Republicans paid Clinton back by trying to impeach him over Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich never got paid back for that.

One of the things I learned in my six years as a Democratic county chair is that, even in small-pond politics, political payback is necessary. When harmful political players play dirty, they must pay a price for it. If they don’t, the dirtiness not only will continue, it will escalate. Democrats wasted years trying to play nice with extremist Republicans. That’s part of how we got to where we are today.

There is a big difference, though, in how tit for tat is played. Nasty players will do things that are simply mean and harmful. Better players will find ways to make tit-for-tat moves that strike a blow for justice.

Newt Gingrich: a pioneer among extremist Republicans playing dirty. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Gun sales are slowing down

Wikipedia photo

The Economist reports that gun sales are now declining after record sales of guns and ammunition last year. The Economist doesn’t say when the peak was, but it may well have been January 2021, when — surprise, surprise — Donald Trump left the White House and Joe Biden moved in.

According to the Economist, the decline (based on the rate of background checks) was greater in red states than in blue states. Gun sales were down 10 percent in New York State, for example, and 40 percent in South Carolina. Much of last year’s gun-buying panic had something to do with the pandemic, it seems. Still, I’m tempted to see this as evidence that even Republicans feel safer with Trump out of power.

Smith & Wesson reported last week that its profits are down. The Texan newspaper reported that a round of 9mm ammunition, which cost 70 cents in January, is now 30 cents.

The Economist quotes an expert on the gun industry from the University of Georgia:

“‘People are no longer marching on state capitols calling for the heads of governors,’ he says, ‘and there has been a lowering of anxiety around the pandemic, and the election of Biden.'”

If the trend is what I hope it is, then maybe people will feel even safer once we get a bunch of people off the streets and into prison — the Trump family, Republicans who committed crimes for Trump, white supremicists, and the people who attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Fiona Hill for president!

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. Fiona Hill, Mariner Books. 432 pages.

I rarely read political memoirs, but I made an exception for Fiona Hill. She made a strong impression on millions of people during the House impeachment hearings of 2019. She was a visible example of the kind of people who, during Trump’s term in the White House, saved the American government from being completely corrupted by political hacks who did everything they could to turn the United States into Russia. Political hacks refer to this kind of people as the “Deep State,” by which the hacks mean: principled professionals who could not be corrupted or easily taken down, people who stood in the way of the Putinization of America.

Hill is a Russia expert. Trump called her “the Russia bitch.” Because she was born down and worked her way up, she did not go down easily. Principle, professionalism, and truth were her secret weapons.

Even from where I sit in the provinces it was clear that the Trumpist intent was — and is — to turn the U.S. into Russia. When someone like Fiona Hill confirms this, we ought to pay attention. She spent her career studying Russia, from the cold and grit of decaying Siberian cities to Moscow dinners sitting beside Putin. She worked in the White House and saw up close how the Trump White House operated. Her many hours of testimony to the House Intelligence committee are on the historical record. Most Republicans will never admit what happened or how close we came to an authoritarian coup, and the Republican cover-up continues. But one of the things that I find comforting, no matter where we end up a few years from now, is that historians are going to know the full story of what happened.

If you heard Hill’s testimony (it’s still available from CSPAN and on YouTube), you know that she is from the north of England. Hill’s perspective on the past thirty years allowed her to see connections that most of us are unable to see. Most important, of course, are the similarities between the Putinization of Russia and the Trumpization of America. She grew up very poor, in impoverished coal country. She is able to see how the policies of the Reagan-Thatcher era destroyed provincial economies but did nothing to mitigate the damage (though Hill also acknowledges that Thatcher was faced with trends and forces beyond her control). During the 1990s, Hill was on the ground in Russia, witnessing how efforts to create a Russian democracy failed and how oligarchs and so-called “populists,” who feed on grievance and disorder, took control. And then came Trump, riding the same whirlwind.

Hill writes that her training and her work have been nonpartisan. But, as Paul Krugman likes to say, reality has a distinctly liberal bias. This entire book, whether Hill intended it or not, is a powerful and urgent case for the enactment of the progressive agenda and a damning historical indictment of where Reaganism, neoliberalism, and so-called populism have led.

The book is in four parts. First, her deprived childhood in County Durham in the northeast of England. Second, how she found her way out, first to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and then to Harvard. Third, she writes about her time in the White House and what she saw there. And fourth, she does her best to offer ideas on what it will take for the United States to avoid Russia’s fate. The key to that is investing in people in the places that have been left behind.

One of the reasons I love this book is that I identify with Fiona Hill. My circumstances were never as harsh as hers, and my achievements were far less. Yet when she writes, for example, about “code switching,” I completely understand. She writes in the book about how she was often humiliated for her provincial accent, in particular when she interviewed at Oxford (and decided to go to St. Andrews instead). Some disadvantaged Brits, she writes, actually take elocution lessons to lose their provincial accents and learn “received pronunciation,” or what we used to call the BBC accent. Margaret Thatcher, for example, took voice lessons in the 1970s. I grew up with the Southern Appalachian dialect. But even in the provincial city of Winston-Salem, where I got my first job, that would not do. Because I had a good ear and an aptitude for languages, I was able to learn to “code switch.” People in San Francisco always told me that they could not detect a Southern accent. “Prove it,” someone once said. “Say something in Southern Appalachian.” I did, and the involuntary look of disgust on his face surprised even me, as though he had found a roach in his soup. Fiona Hill had similar experiences, and I greatly respect her for not trying to change her accent. She moved to America for greater opportunity, just as I moved to San Francisco for greater opportunity.

The subtitle of this book is about finding opportunity. How people talk is only one of many things that keep them down. Lack of education, lack of social support (meaning that there is no one there to help them), racism, classism, and the economic decay of rural and post-industrial regions are the biggies that keep people down.

Conservatives and even today’s so-called “centrists” have no solutions. In fact, conservatives do everything possible to block progress and push societies toward inequality and authoritarianism.

In a way, I regret that I have to say that this book is a powerful argument for the progressive agenda, because I don’t think that was Fiona Hill’s intention. But (like reality) a rational, historical, pragmatic, and nonpartisan outlook has a distinctly liberal bias. Conservatives dismiss Hill as a subversive and a George Soros mole in the White House. But what is clear to me is that the progressive view, and the progressive prescription for our problems, are not just a bias. It’s just a sensible, informed, and pragmatic way of looking at the world today. If I have a bias, it’s this: the progressive view and the progressive prescription for our problems are the only sensible, informed, and pragmatic way of looking at the world today.