Sunday, August 27, 2017

Weekend Roundup

The big story, one I have nothing on below, is probably what Hurricane Harvey is doing to Texas as I write -- and as I look at the forecast map, will keep doing through Wednesday. I watched one woman on Fox News going on about how this disaster will finally give Trump the chance to appear presidential and gain back some of his lost support. I noted how the governor of Texas was thanking the federal government for their support. Evidently this won't be the week when Republicans go around quoting Ronald Reagan on how the scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." In point of fact, the party that wants to reduce government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub doesn't have a very good record in responding to natural disasters (or, really, any kind of disaster -- cf. 9/11 as well as Katrina).

This week's scattered links:

  • Zeeshan Aleem: Nikki Haley's path to the presidency runs right past Trump: Notes that "The UN ambassador's profile is rising as she runs her own show," and quotes Sen. Lindsey Graham as saying, "She sounds more like me than Trump." I wonder if Haley didn't get the idea that UN Ambassador would be a plum presidential stepping stone from House of Cards. It certainly gives her opportunities to poise bellicose for the press. Of course, if people start talking her up, Trump might get jealous and sack her. On the other hand, that's probably in her plan as the next step.

  • Randall Balmer: Under Trump, evangelicals show their true racist colors.

  • Zack Beauchamp: Sebastian Gorka, Trump's most controversial national security aide, is out: Obviously the next to go after Bannon got sacked, at least he took the time to write a blustery resignation letter, vowing to fight on against the administration's "globalists" in Trump's name -- as the old joke goes, now he'll be outside the tent pissing in.

  • Alvin Chang: We analyzed 17 months of Fox & Friends transcripts. It's far weirder than state-run media.

    Since Trump was elected, Fox & Friends has taken a special place in the media landscape. It's clear that the program is in something of a feedback loop with the president. But contrary to what CNN president Jeff Zucker says, this isn't state-run television "extolling the line out of the White House." Scholars tend to say state-run media usually aims to keep the rank and file in line, while demobilizing the populace and deflating political opposition. Most of it is very boring. Watch some live Chinese state-run media and you'll immediately understand. . . .

    What we found is that Fox & Friends has a symbiotic relationship with Trump that is far weirder and more interesting than state media. Instead of talking for Trump, they are talking to him.

    The regular hosts -- Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Ainsley Earhardt -- and their rotating cast of guests increasingly view their role as giving advice to the president. They prognosticate on what the president, his staff, or his party should do. And it's all couched in language that makes it seem they are on his side -- that the damning news reports from mainstream media were unfair obstacles to his presidency.

    That is in contrast to what Fox & Friends was before Trump. In 2013, media scholar Jeffrey P. Jones argued that Fox & Friends creates an ideologically homogeneous community and reinforces it by creating a high school-like atmosphere. "The show is designed to thrust the viewer into a common-sense groupthink, complete with all the rumours, smears, innuendo, fear-mongering, thinly veiled ad hominem attacks, and lack of rational discourse they can muster -- you know, just like high school," he writes.

    But in the 2016 election, the man who loves their show and listens to their political and cultural ruminations became the leader of the free world.

    Fox & Friends went from being the bully on the periphery to the prom king's posse.

  • Esme Cribb: Trump's Afghan Strategy: 'Killing Terrorists,' Not Nation Building: Quick summary of Trump's Monday night "Afghanistan Strategy" speech. Despite all the "pillars" and "multi-pronged strategy," what this sounds like is that he's shelving the COIN theory -- all that stuff about protecting Afghan communities and helping them develop -- and returning to the core competency of the US military, which is wholesale slaughter of anyone who gets in our way (aka, "killing terrorists"; who are these "terrorists"? well, the people we kill). To accomplish this he'll allow the generals to requisition whatever forces they want, with no review from the White House let alone Congress. And he's set the standard for ending the war so high that it's become a moot point. In effect, he's put the war on autopilot, where the only real goal is to punish the Afghan people for America's failure to secure any form of stability. This approach is not unprecedented in American history: Nixon did the same thing in Vietnam when he reduced US troop levels while winding up with a murderous rampage, hoping to impress on the world that while a people may defy the United States, they will suffer mightily for the affront. The only word that described this is sadism: having failed to impose American will, the only way Trump can recover his sense of power is by inflicting suffering on others. Trump's concept of "America First" doesn't seem to extend much beyond "fuck everyone else" (nor does his concept of America extend to many people living here).

    Some more links on Trump and Afghanistan:

  • John Feffer: Avoiding War With Pyongyang: alternate title, "Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy." Good in-depth article, which points out that the US (Jimmy Carter, at least) has successfully negotiated with the DPRK before, that in terms of crazy vs. crazy Trump and Kim Jong-un have little if anything on Nixon and Mao in 1970, and that despite all those sanctions North Korea has been cautiously changing toward the sort of market economy corporations love doing business with in China. Now, if only someone in Washington was listening. Another report suggesting that Kim Jong-un might not be the crazier of the adversaries is: Jon Schwarz: North Korea Keeps Saying It Might Give Up Its Nuclear Weapons -- but Most News Outlets Won't Tell You That.

  • Rebecca Gordon: Is Anything the Moral Equivalent of War? Reading the title, I recognized the phrase but couldn't place it, perhaps because it never made sense to me: at least from the early Americanization of the Vietnam War I never saw anything moral in war, so couldn't imagine any virtuous activity as being its "moral equivalent." The phrase turns out to have been coined by William James in 1906 attempting to find an alternative activity to the "martial spirit" that warmongers like Theodore Roosevelt were so keen on promoting. The phrase was then popularized in a 1977 speech by President Jimmy Carter where he tried to marshall America's militarist spirits to tackle the "energy crisis." As you no doubt recall, the American people responded by voting Carter out of office, choosing instead to bury their heads in Reagan's "morning in America" fantasy. Probably didn't help that the acronym militarists gave the speech was MEOW, but the fact is that by 1977 even real war didn't satisfy James' MEOW demands. A couple years earlier the Army had given up on the draft because way too many of those impressed into service couldn't be trusted to carry out orders -- the obvious advantage of the no-draft army is that volunteers were much less likely to "frag" their officers. On the other hand, even "professional" soldiers are likely to have joined for purely economic reasons, which only made sense if their risk was minimal. Gordon plays a bit with MEOW theory, noting that war "requires from whole populations a special kind of heroic focus, a willingness to mobilize and sacrifice, a commitment to community or country . . . it also requires people to relinquish their own petty interests in the service of a greater whole." That, at least, is the idea behind America's many metaphorical wars -- on crime, poverty, drugs, cancer -- none of which have been particularly successful, possibly because Americans no longer seek MEOWs -- or, in most cases, let real shooting wars impose much on their everyday lives. But it's also because our conventional thinking about war corrupts and perverts these metaphorical wars, which is something Gordon does go into at more depth. She also suggests that the War on Terror is itself yet another metaphorical war, even though this one is fought with bombs and bullets.

  • Josh Marshall: Thoughts on Trump's Speech: On Tuesday's rally in Phoenix:

    Aside from the rambling weirdness, the big things are these. President Trump spent something like forty-five minutes in a wide-ranging primal scream about Charlottesville, ranting at the press, giving what might generously be called a deeply misleading and dishonest summary of what he actually said. It all amounted to one big attack on the press for supposedly lying about him.

    There were some other points that were momentary and perhaps easy to miss but quite important.

    1. Trump essentially promised he would pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a major sop to the anti-immigrant, white nationalist base.
    2. Trump suggested he would probably end up withdrawing from NAFTA because negotiations will fail. That statement will have major repercussions.
    3. Trump threatened to shut down the government to force Congress's hand on getting his border wall.
    4. While grandiosely not mentioning the names of Jeff Flake or John McCain, he nonetheless went after them and made his opposition to both quite clear. Presidents don't generally attack members of their own party going into a midterm elections.

    More links related to Trump's speech in Arizona:

    • Jenna Johnson: As Trump ranted and rambled in Phoenix, his crowd slowly thinned:

      Just before President Trump strolled onto the rally stage on Tuesday evening, four speakers took turns carefully denouncing hate, calling for unity and ever so subtly assuring the audience that the president is not racist. . . . Meanwhile, a supporter seated directly behind stage even wore a T-shirt that stated: "Trump & Republicans are not racist."

      Then Trump took the stage.

      He didn't attempt to continue the carefully choreographed messaging of the night or to narrow the ever-deepening divide between the thousands of supporters gathered in the convention center hall before him and the thousands of protesters waiting outside.

      Instead, Trump spent the first three minutes of his speech -- which would drag on for 75 minutes -- marveling at his crowd size, claiming that "there aren't too many people outside protesting," predicting that the media would not broadcast shots of his "rather incredible" crowd and reminiscing about how he was "center stage, almost from day one, in the debates."

    • Dara Lind: Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant sheriff That Trump wants to save from prison, explained. Also on Arpaio, see: Noah Feldman: Arpaio Pardon Would Show Contempt for Constitution.

    • Heather Digby Parton: Trump in Arizona: Threats, paranoia and a dark lesson in white history.

    • Charles P Pierce: I Have No More Patience for Trump Supporters:

      Before we get to the other stuff, and there was lots of other stuff, I'd like to address myself to those people represented by the parenthetical notation (Applause) in the above transcript, those people who waited for hours in 105-degree heat so that they could have the G-spot of their irrationality properly stroked for them. You're all suckers. You're dim and you're ignorant and you can't even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, . . .

      A guy basically went mad, right there on the stage in front of you, and you cheered and booed right on cue because you're sheep and because he directed his insanity at all the scapegoats that your favorite radio and TV personalities have been creating for you over the past three decades.

    On Friday, Joe Arpaio became the first person Trump issued a presidential pardon for. See: Dara Lind: The real reason Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio:

    [Arpaio's contempt of court conviction ] was a predictable consequence of the way he'd run his department -- guided by a philosophy that as long as law-enforcement officials were grabbing headlines by going after undesirable people, the public wouldn't care so much about how it was done.

    The Trump administration has turned that philosophy into a matter of federal rhetoric (such as Trump's "joke" urging officers to be rough with suspects when shoving them into the backs of police cars) and policy (in walking back court-enforced federal oversight of police departments). President Trump himself is liable to tweet angrily about "so-called" judges when he doesn't get his way.

    Joe Arpaio is lucky that he was convicted under a president who cares more about the order Arpaio professed to maintain than the laws to which he was supposed to adhere. But Donald Trump is far luckier that he had, in Arpaio, a model for how such a politician could operate.

    Lind also wrote: Trump's Arpaio pardon sends a message to sheriffs: I'm your get-out-of-jail-free card; also see: Lawrence Douglas: Why Donald Trump pardoned the unpardonable Joe Arpaio; Andrew Rudalevige: Why Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio isn't like most presidential pardons; Conor Friedersdorf: The Arpaio Pardon Is a Flagrant Assault on Civil Rights; Scott Lemieux: The disturbing lessons of Trump's shameful Arpaio pardon. Douglas may have the best quote:

    What unites these acts of teardown are their cheapness, cynicism and recklessness. They are cheap: requiring nothing in the way of the hard work of shaping and negotiating policy. This is a politics of fatigue, indolence elevated to administrative practice. They are cynical: the performance of a president-cum-snake-oil-salesman, working to dupe his credulous audience that his bogus recipes constitute the promised potent tonic. And they are reckless, profoundly reckless, as they represent a contempt for the rule of law and for the norms of constitutional democracy.

    In pardoning Arpaio, our unpresident has undone the principle that informs the practice of pardon; he has sided with the lawless renegade against our federal judiciary and the constitution itself.

    Also on Arpaio, here's a link to a 2008 story, about how taxpayers had to pay $1.1 million "to settle another of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lawsuits," also "on top of the more than $43 million the county has paid for the jail lawsuits": Matt Shuham: 'Arizona Republic' Slams Arpaio Pardon: Trump Made It Clear Racism 'Is a Goal'; A Phony Murder Plot Against Joe Arpaio Winds Up Costing Taxpayers $1.1 Million.

    By the way, there is a case for presidential pardons. Here's a story where the power was used constructively: Ted Gioia: The Jazz Pianist That John F. Kennedy Saved.

  • Josh Marshall: Trump Is Killing McConnell in Kentucky: Latest PPP poll gives McConnell an 18% approval rating vs. 74% disapproval -- a drop which necessarily includes a lot of Republicans who have followed Trump's lead in blaming McConnell for Senate inaction on Trump agenda items. Also note that Trump's approval rating in Kentucky is still up at 60%, so he has way more sway there than nationwide. Still unlikely, I think, that Trump can convert such dissatisfaction into a viable primary challenge, but these numbers don't prove that he can't.

  • Corey Robin: Will Steve Bannon's war tear apart the Republican party?

    The right-wing racial populism that once served the conservative cause so well is now, as even the most conservative Republicans are acknowledging, getting in its way. Whatever the outcome of the civil war Bannon intends to fight, it'll be waged against the backdrop of a declining rather than an ascendant movement, with the tools of yesterday rather than tomorrow.

    That is why, having had seven months in the White House to prosecute his populist war on the Republican establishment -- something Buckley and his minions could only dream of in 1955 -- Bannon now finds himself staring into the abyss of a website, hoping to find there a power he couldn't find in the most powerful office of the world.

    Robin also wrote When Political Scientists Legitimate Torturers, about John Yoo's featured role in next week's American Political Science Association get together. Yoo was one of lawyers who rationalized the Bush-Cheney craving for torture, in a series of legal briefs that were pretty sadly tortured themselves. Robin cites Victor Klemperer arguing that the intellectuals who celebrated the Third Reich should be held as more guilty than the henchmen who merely carried out the crimes. Indeed, as I recall, there was a special session of the Nuremberg trials that focused on lawyers and judges. Lawyers like Yoo were in a position to prevent crimes from happening, and their failure to do so -- indeed, their active efforts as enablers -- should never be forgotten.

  • Dylan Scott: Why Obamacare didn't implode: Specifically, why every county in the country has at least one insurance company offering private coverage under ACA, contrary to recently raised alarms. Still lots of money to be made out there, at least as long as the federal government keeps paying subsidies. And while counties with no coverage are simply wasted, being the only insurer in a county is especially profitable.

  • Matt Taibbi: The Media Is the Villain -- for Creating a World Dumb Enough for Trump: More on how constant chaos and disaster has been good for business. The more general charge -- that the media have created the very conditions in which someone like Trump could become president -- could use a little more sharpening, but he does get this far:

    We learned long ago in this business that dumber and more alarmist always beats complex and nuanced. Big headlines, cartoonish morality, scary criminals at home and foreign menaces abroad, they all sell. We decimated attention spans, rewarded hot-takers over thinkers, and created in audiences powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear, self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment.

    There isn't a news executive alive low enough to deny that we use xenophobia and racism to sell ads. Black people on TV for decades were almost always shirtless and chased by cops, and the "rock-throwing Arab" photo was a staple of international news sections even before 9/11. And when all else fails in the media world, just show more cleavage somewhere, and ratings go up, every time.

    Donald Trump didn't just take advantage of these conditions. He was created in part by them. What's left of Trump's mind is like a parody of the average American media consumer: credulous, self-centered, manic, sex-obsessed, unfocused, and glued to stories that appeal to his sense of outrage and victimhood.

    We've created a generation of people like this: anger addicts who can't read past the first page of a book. This is why the howls of outrage from within the ranks of the news media about Trump's election ring a little bit false. What the hell did we expect would happen? Who did we think would rise to prominence in our rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment? Sensitive geniuses?

    We spent years selling the lowest common denominator. Now the lowest common denominator is president. How can it be anything but self-deception to pretend this is an innocent coincidence?

    Paul Woodward comments (How much responsibility does the media have for creating Trump?), but doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. I don't have time to start unpacking this here.

  • Jean M Twenge: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? "More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis." I've long been impressed with arguments about how technological change shapes how we view the world -- most memorable was John Berger's "Moment of Cubism," which attributed the sudden emergence of abstract art to the extraordinary mechanization circa 1900. As a "baby boomer" (b. 1950), I noted that all generations had their gaps, but ours seemed to be exceptionally large, contrasting the despair of depression and war my parents came of age in to the relative prosperity and security of my youth -- and, of course, I noted the technological factors, especially television. Indeed, it's tempting to blame nearly everything bad that's happened since on television (and, I'd add, its advertising) -- although more recent social critics have moved on to blaming computers and the internet, which have become vastly more immersive with the advent of smart phones. On the other hand, I've learned to lean against most claims of generational change, recognizing that continuity has a powerful way of reasserting itself. For instance, when I read this:

    My friends and I plotted to get our driver's license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our suburban neighborhood. . . .

    But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today's teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

    I think the anomaly here was back in the 1950s/60s, when cars (and, belatedly, roads) seemed to open up vast new vistas to explore and to experience. Since then cars have become ordinary and so utilitarian, while their maintenance costs have become more onerous -- something to be put off as long as possible. Meanwhile, air travel has become the portal to new vistas. I suspect her data on dating can be given a similar explanation. Still, I was struck by this, partly because the statistics given seem to be so significant:

    Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today's teens. Boys' depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls' increased by 50 percent -- more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.

    If total numbers are very small such a sudden jump might not be significant, but I suspect it is. I'd be more inclined to look for causes in the politico-economic sphere: increasing inequality chokes off opportunity for most people, persistent war generates terror, and American stupidity on things like climate change is enough to bum out any sentient being, but those things will hit the young much longer and harder than I can relate to. I grew up in a time when it was easy to be optimistic, yet even then my teen years were the most depressing of my life. Smart phones obviously steal time away from other things teens used to do, but as someone who had no appreciable social life back then I'm tempted to think the change may be for the better. But like all change, the blessings are mixed, and it would be better if we understood and appreciated that.

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that actually mattered this week: Trump announced a "new" strategy for Afghanistan; Republicans were consumed with weird infighting; Obamacare's empty counties all got filled; Health care at a crossroads. Other Yglesias: Trump's big mistake on health care was not realizing Republicans were lying; Democrats' 2018 gerrymandering problem is really bad ("a leading forecast says they'll get 54% of the votes -- and only 47% of the seats"); Justin Trudeau, unlike Trump, is taking NAFTA renegotiation really seriously; After embracing orthodox Republicanism on all fronts, what's the point of Trump?; Steve Bannon's "economic nationalism" is total nonsense. The latter piece could, I think, be better argued, but it's not like Trump (or even Bannon) has given us anything very substantial to work with. About the only idea I've heard to advance this thing called "economic nationalism" was a big tax on selected imports -- what we used to call a tariff -- but that's been squelched by lobbyists for companies that import lots of stuff, like WalMart. More simplistically, no one doubts that globalization has both winners and losers, both inside America and outside. The problem is our political system caters to winners and deplores losers. Trump was able to get some votes in 2016 by appearing less part of that system, but he never offered anything concrete to help the victims of globalization, and the lobbyists and millionaires he stocked his administration with aren't going to come up with anything either.

    I also have problems with "Trump's big mistake," which tries to credit Trump with wanting something better, at least during the campaign:

    On the campaign trail, he outlined some humane and politically popular ideas about health care policy like that Medicaid shouldn't be cut and that the United States should have a system that covers everybody even if that means the government needs to pay for it. A responsible president would move beyond peevish anger at congressional Republicans for failing to help him fulfill that vision and start reaching out to people who can help him. McConnell and Ryan aren't going to get the job done, but Trump's failure to even try to work across party lines on health policy is staggering -- and his anger at Republican leaders only makes it more glaring.

    The plainly obvious fact is that Trump doesn't care what's in the Republican Congressional bills, nor did he care what positions he took during the campaign. Remember his victory celebration when the House passed the second iteration of Ryan's bill, tweaked to gain right-wing votes even though it was obvious then that the bill would have to be scrapped and retooled to have a prayer in the Senate? If Trump cared about his campaign promises, he would have worked to make the bill less (not more) malevolent, but he didn't. And quite plainly, the only complaint he has about McConnell is that his bill failed, making Trump and the Republicans look weak. This matters not just for his ego, but because the idea that he's some kind of juggernaut helps to keep his business allies in line.

For background on the Confederate monuments issue, Paul Woodward points us to a 2001 book review by James M McPherson: Southern Comfort, which makes it crystal clear that the Confederate states seceded to buttress and defend (and ultimately to promote) their system of race-based slavery. That's shown well in the quote Woodward plucked out. That much has been clear to me for a long time, but I was struck by the timeliness (or timelessness) of the following:

As Richards makes clear, Southern politicians did not use this national power to buttress states' rights; quite the contrary. In the 1830s Congress imposed a gag rule to stifle antislavery petitions from Northern states. The Post Office banned antislavery literature from the mail if it was sent to Southern states. In 1850 Southerners in Congress, plus a handful of Northern allies, enacted a Fugitive Slave Law that was the strongest manifestation of national power thus far in American history. In the name of protecting the rights of slave owners, it extended the long arm of federal law, enforced by marshals and the army, into Northern states to recover escaped slaves and return them to their owners.

Senator Jefferson Davis, who later insisted that the Confederacy fought for the principle of state sovereignty, voted with enthusiasm for the Fugitive Slave Law. When Northern state legislatures invoked states' rights and individual liberties against this federal law, the Supreme Court with its majority of Southern justices reaffirmed the supremacy of national law to protect slavery (Ableman v. Booth, 1859). Many observers in the 1850s would have predicted that if a rebellion in the name of states' rights were to occur, it would be the North that would rebel.

Of course, having grown up in the '50s and '60s when Senate filibusters were almost exclusively used to frustrate majority-supported civil rights bills, it's always been clear to me that "states rights" was never more than an opportunistic ruse. More recently, it's become clear that Republicans will exalt the use of any jurisdiction they happen to hold power over -- the most obvious example is how they have taken to using their state legislative powers to overturn city and county statutes they dislike (Missouri vs. St. Louis is a leading case-in-point). Most recently, we see Trump and Sessions attempting to impose broad federal powers on "sanctuary cities" -- ostensibly to force them to help enforce federal anti-immigration law, which come to think of it isn't far removed from the 1850s Fugitive Slave Law.

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