Category Archives: Random Blogging

Worldviews

Andrew Sullivan has a different “take” on the reason for Trump’s slavish devotion to Vladimir Putin.

It’s a fascinating read, if ultimately unpersuasive–as others have noted, at the end of the day, the fact that the two men share a distasteful and dangerous worldview is insufficient to explain Trump’s puppy-dog fidelity–but it is wickedly perceptive as far as it goes.

Sullivan’s opening presents his thesis:

It is possible, is it not, that Donald Trump simply believes what he says.

I realize, of course, that this is technically impossible from moment to moment. But bear with me. The slackened jaws, widened eyes, and general shock that greeted his chuffed endorsement of the Kremlin over Washington this past week were understandable but misplaced. Everything Trump did in Europe — every horrifying, sick-making, embarrassing expostulation — is, in some way, consistent, and predictable, when you consider how he sees the world. It’s not a plan or a strategy as such. Trump is bereft of the attention span to sustain any of those. It is rather the reflection of a set of core beliefs and instincts that have governed him for much of his life. The lies come and go. But his deeper convictions really are in plain sight.

Those “deeper convictions” are the ones that drive rational people crazy. As Sullivan says, they are pretty much the same as the convictions (“impulses” might be a more accurate term) of the strongmen and thugs with whom he has always surrounded himself.

Accordingly,

The post-1945 attempt to organize the world around collective security, free trade, open societies, non-zero-sum diplomacy, and multicultural democracies is therefore close to unintelligible to him. Why on earth, in his mind, would a victorious power after a world war be … generous to its defeated foes?

This rings true. As we’ve seen with his phony Foundation, “generosity” is the last word one would apply to Trump.

Sullivan’s entire description of Trump is devastating because it is so consistent with what we have seen every day from the embarrassing buffoon who has soiled the Oval Office for the past 18 plus months. After describing the post-WWII world that America was instrumental in building, Sullivan writes

That kind of complex, interdependent world requires virtues he doesn’t have and skills he doesn’t possess. He wants a world he intuitively understands: of individual nations, in which the most powerful are free to bully the others. He wants an end to transnational migration, especially from south to north. It unnerves him. He believes that warfare should be engaged not to defend the collective peace as a last resort but to plunder and occupy and threaten. He sees no moral difference between free and authoritarian societies, just a difference of “strength,” in which free societies, in his mind, are the weaker ones. He sees nations as ethno-states, exercising hard power, rather than liberal societies, governed by international codes of conduct. He believes in diplomacy as the meeting of strongmen in secret, doing deals, in alpha displays of strength — not endless bullshit sessions at multinational summits. He’s the kind of person who thinks that the mafia boss at the back table is the coolest guy in the room.

This is why he has such a soft spot for Russia. Its kleptocratic elites see the world in just the same way.

Why look for collusion when this agreement of worldviews explains so much? Yes, Sullivan says, it’s perfectly possible that Trump knowingly accepted Russian help. It’s perfectly possible that he is still encouraging Russia to help him again.

But that’s simply the kind of unethical thing Trump has done for years, without batting an eyelid. He sees no more conflict here than he did in seeking Russian funding and German loans for his businesses.

Sullivan concludes that Trump simply wants an alliance to advance his and Putin’s amoral and cynical vision of world politics.

The descriptions of Trump and Putin that emerge from this essay are devastatingly negative–and yet, I think Sullivan ends up giving Trump too much credit. Much like other critics who ascribe sinister and devious strategies to our pathetic President, he attributes “vision” to a man I see as utterly incapable of formulating a vision– even a dark and self-serving one. Urges, yes. Vision? Not so much.

Sullivan does get one description absolutely right: that of today’s GOP.

And we know now that the whole Kabuki drama in which we keep asking when the GOP will resist this, or stop it, or come to its senses, is simply a category error. This is what the GOP now is. It’s an authoritarian, nationalist leadership cult, hostile to the global order. Republican voters increasingly like Putin, and 71 percent of Republicans backTrump’s handling of Russia in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. A whole third of Republicans do not believe the Kremlin attacked our democracy in 2016, despite every single intelligence agency and the Republicans in the House saying so. Seventy-nine percent of Republicans in a SurveyMonkey poll actually approved of Trump’s performance in the Helsinki press conference.

This is not treason as such. It is not an attack on America, but on a version of America, the liberal democratic one, supported by one of the great parties in America. It is an attack on those institutions that Trump believes hurt America — like NATO and NAFTA and the E.U. It is a championing of an illiberal America, and a partnering with autocrats in a replay of old-school Great Power zero-sum politics, in which the strong pummel and exploit the weak.

And it is all infinitely depressing.

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How Many Justices Are On The Supreme Court? And Other Civic Literacy Questions…

One of the questions that routinely appears on surveys assessing what Americans know–or don’t–about their government is “how many justices serve on the Supreme Court?” It’s not as silly as “how many stripes are on the American flag?” but it’s close–neither question probes the respondent’s actual knowledge of the philosophy or structure of American government. They fall under the category of “government trivia.”

I’ve previously blogged about the difference between that sort of information and the nature of the non-trivial understandings that citizens ought to have, and I promise this isn’t one of those rants. (I know–you’re relieved.)

The answer to that question about the justices on the Supreme Court is nine. But there is no magic to that number.

It is not required by the Constitution. It hasn’t even always been nine. And as an article by a Rutgers law professor argues, it’s inadequate to the duties assigned to America’s top court. And his argument has nothing to do with suggestions that the Court be expanded if Kavanaugh is confirmed and Democrats subsequently take control of the Presidency.

The battle over court packing is being fought on the wrong terms. Americans of all political stripes should want to see the court expanded, but not to get judicial results more favorable to one party. Instead, we need a bigger court because the current institutional design is badly broken. The right approach isn’t a revival of FDR’s court packing plan, which would have increased the court to 15, or current plans, which call for 11. Instead, the right size is much, much bigger. Three times its current size, or 27, is a good place to start, but it’s quite possible the optimal size is even higher. This needn’t be done as a partisan gambit to stack more liberals on the court. Indeed, the only sensible way to make this change would be to have it phase in gradually, perhaps adding two justices every other year, to prevent any one president and Senate from gaining an unwarranted advantage.

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Chilling…And Compelling

One of my favorite anecdotes about the early days of America’s newspapers comes from a friend who has edited a number of small-town papers and is something of a journalism history buff.  Early newspapers did no reporting; they were just compilations of the circulars generated mostly by the political parties. According to my friend, the masthead of one such publication  proclaimed “interesting, if true.”

That pretty much sums up my reaction to a recent, lengthy and unnervingly persuasive article in New York Magazine.

And that was before Trump’s disastrous, groveling presser with Putin in Helsinki.

The article was written by Jonathan Chait, whose previous work I have found solid (to the extent I am capable of making such judgments). Chait didn’t claim his thesis is proven, only that it is plausible. It was a “what if” speculation that looked at the entirety of what we knew before that outrageous betrayal of his oath of office .

The unfolding of the Russia scandal has been like walking into a dark cavern. Every step reveals that the cave runs deeper than we thought, and after each one, as we wonder how far it goes, our imaginations are circumscribed by the steps we have already taken. The cavern might go just a little farther, we presume, but probably not muchfarther. And since trying to discern the size and shape of the scandal is an exercise in uncertainty, we focus our attention on the most likely outcome, which is that the story goes a little deeper than what we have already discovered. Say, that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort told their candidate about the meeting they held at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer after they were promised dirt on Hillary Clinton; and that Trump and Kushner have some shady Russian investments; and that some of Trump’s advisers made some promises about lifting sanctions.

But what if that’s wrong? What if we’re still standing closer to the mouth of the cave than the end?

The media has treated the notion that Russia has personally compromised the president of the United States as something close to a kook theory. A minority of analysts, mostly but not exclusively on the right, have promoted aggressively exculpatory interpretations of the known facts, in which every suspicious piece of evidence turns out to have a surprisingly innocent explanation. And it is possible, though unlikely, that every trail between Trump Tower and the Kremlin extends no farther than its point of current visibility.

Chait goes through the lengthy chronology of Trump’s connections with Russia, a chronology suggesting that the situation may be much worse than we now suspect. As he notes, publicly available information about the Russia scandal is extensive, but disjointed.

The way it has been delivered — scoop after scoop of discrete nuggets of information — has been disorienting and difficult to follow. What would it look like if it were reassembled into a single narrative?

It’s tempting to dismiss the article as yet another conspiracy theory in an age that seems to encourage them, but as Chait points out, the people who seem most convinced of its likelihood are not the radio shock-jocks or other “usual suspects.” They are people like John Brennan, former head of the CIA, and other high government officials.

If Chait’s “what if” speculation proves true, calling it “chilling” is an understatement.

If that’s true, we are in the midst of a scandal unprecedented in American history, a subversion of the integrity of the presidency. It would mean the Cold War that Americans had long considered won has dissolved into the bizarre spectacle of Reagan’s party’s abetting the hijacking of American government by a former KGB agent. It would mean that when Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the president and his inner circle, possibly beginning this summer, Trump may not merely rail on Twitter but provoke a constitutional crisis.

And it would mean the Russia scandal began far earlier than conventionally understood and ended later — indeed, is still happening. As Trump arranges to meet face-to-face and privately with Vladimir Putin later this month, the collusion between the two men metastasizing from a dark accusation into an open alliance, it would be dangerous not to consider the possibility that the summit is less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.

After that disgraceful press conference, Chait’s “possibility” seems all too likely.

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GOP’s Moment Of Truth

We really are in “never never” land. It is impossible to draw innocent conclusions from yesterday’s press conference following Trump’s private meeting with Vladimir Putin.  During yet another incoherent and unhinged rant, the President insulted America’s intelligence community and insisted that he believed Putin’s denials of election interference.

The “summit” with Putin came on the heels of disastrous meetings during which Trump insulted America’s closest allies and inflicted significant damage on important American alliances.  In stark contrast, he absolutely fawned over Putin– even after Putin made a point of coming 45 minutes late to their meeting, a public signal of disrespect that somehow didn’t enrage our notoriously thin-skinned POTUS.

At this point in the surreal saga that has been the Trump presidency, there is no longer any doubt about Russia’s interference in the American election. That case has been made over and over by American Intelligence officials, most recently, Dan Coats. It has been confirmed by the mounting number of detailed indictments filed and guilty pleas obtained by Bob Mueller.

Over at Vox, Ezra Klein has an exhaustive (and damning) list of what we now absolutely know.Not what we speculate, not what we surmise, but what we know.

Nevertheless, as Klein noted,

Standing next to Putin, Trump turned on America’s intelligence services, and again mused about how much better it might have been if Russia had cracked Clinton’s server and gotten her documents.

So while the entire world was watching, the President of the United States attacked agents of his own country and administration– and gave Putin a big wet kiss.

As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, 

Such behavior by an American president is so perverse, so contrary to American interests and values, that it leads to only one conclusion: Donald Trump is either an asset of Russian intelligence or really enjoys playing one on TV.

Everything that happened in Helsinki today only reinforces that conclusion. My fellow Americans, we are in trouble and we have some big decisions to make today. This was a historic moment in the entire history of the United States.

There is overwhelming evidence that our president, for the first time in our history, is deliberately or through gross negligence or because of his own twisted personality engaged in treasonous behavior — behavior that violates his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

A Manchurian candidate committing intentional treason would have been more skillful. Even if–as a friend of mine posits–the Russian oligarchs who have financed Trump for years have him “by the short hairs”– the stupidity displayed at the press conference was counterproductive. This clumsy and irrational performance  just adds to the already overwhelming amount of evidence that (while he may or not be a knowing Russian asset) Trump is definitely seriously mentally ill.

The real question is: what will Congressional Republicans do with this incontrovertible, in-your-face evidence of traitorous behavior? How long can they pretend he is either competent or acting in America’s interests? As Friedman says,

Every single Republican lawmaker will be — and should be — asked on the election trail: Are you with Trump and Putin or are you with the C.I.A., F.B.I. and N.S.A.?

As former CIA chief John Brennan tweeted,

Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you??? 

Where indeed? They sure aren’t from Indiana. And I haven’t noticed much in the way of patriotism from other Republicans currently serving in the House or Senate.

The refusal of an American President to honor his oath of office–his refusal to protect and defend our country– is a Constitutional crisis. If GOP lawmakers continue to put their own interests and those of their party above their duty to the country, if they continue to abet this President’s erratic and treasonous behavior, history will not be kind to them.

Hopefully, neither will the voters.

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The Last Laugh?

One of the striking differences between Right-wing folks and those further left on the political spectrum is the humorlessness of the former. (Admittedly, go too far left, and you’ll find folks who are equally humorless.)

Some of you may recall efforts to find a Rightwing counterpart to Jon Stewart, back when he and the Daily Show were huge cultural influences.  It failed miserably–the short-lived conservative effort just wasn’t funny. Currently, late night humor/satire is predictably anti-Trump. I would be hard-pressed to name a popular conservative comedian.

What made me think about the uneven distribution of witty entertainment was reading #Secondcivilwarletters.

For readers of this blog who may inexplicably have missed them, the “letters”–patterned after the letters read as part of Ken Burns’ civil war documentary–absolutely owned Twitter and the Internet. The hashtag was a response to crazy Alex Jones’ (Infowars) assertion that “the liberals” were going to start a second civil war on the 4th of July. (News flash to Alex–it’s the 10th. No war yet.)

The only war that did begin was with humor on Twitter–and it was brilliant. And very funny.

In a large number of them, liberals poked fun at themselves and what we might term “liberal culture.” For example:

Dear Mother: the WiFi is weak and my last tweet went unliked. iPhone battery at 3%. Soles of my Toms are worn thin. Tonight we decamp to the Prospect Park bandshell with only goat cheese, a flat sheet, and a dry Zinfandel to watch Antibalas perform.

The ability to laugh at yourself is–in my humble opinion–the most essential element of a genuine sense of humor. (My mother used to say that anyone can laugh when someone else slips on a banana peel, but people with a real sense of humor can laugh when they slip on a banana peel.)

So what, you say. Why does humor matter?

It matters because a number of research studies have found an association between humour and intelligence.

Researchers in Austria recently discovered that funny people, particularly those who enjoy dark humour, have higher IQs than their less funny peers. They argue that it takes both cognitive and emotional ability to process and produce humour. Their analysis shows that funny people have higher verbal and non-verbal intelligence, and they score lower in mood disturbance and aggressiveness.

Not only are funny people smart, they’re nice to be around. Evidence suggests that having a good sense of humour is linked to high emotional intelligence and is a highly desirable quality in a partner. Evolutionary psychologists describe humour as a “heritable trait” that signals mental fitness and intellectual agility to prospective mates. In studies of attractiveness, both men and women rate funny people as more attractive, and cite having a good sense of humour as being one of the most important traits in a long-term partner.

The connection between intelligence and education is much more attenuated–plenty of people who haven’t gone to college are smart (and as a college professor I can attest to the fact that plenty of people who have managed to get through college are significantly less than brilliant.) But to the extent that ones’ level of education does signify knowledge or intellect, it’s telling that white support for Trump divides sharply between people without college degrees–who voted for and/or support him– and people with college degrees, who didn’t and don’t.

In this age of tribalism, there are so many ways Americans have “sliced and diced” ourselves–religion, race, gender, urban versus rural, etc. I’m really reluctant to add to those divisions, especially with a snippy and facile generalization. But there are some conclusions we can draw from the characteristics of the pro- and con-Trump camps, and one of them is that smart people don’t support this unstable, ignorant and dangerous President.

Who will get the last laugh is, unfortunately, still an open question.

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