A few reactions to Donald Trump's speech to the UN General Assembly

Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies analysing Trump's strange, nationalistic, belligerant speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, Trump's 'Dissociation from Reality' at UN The Real News 09/25/2018:

This is a German-language report on Trump's speech from Spiegel TV, Rede des US-Präsidenten vor der Uno: "Schwach, was Trump hier aufgeführt hat" 26.09.2018:

Another from WELT, LACHER UND SCHARFE ANGRIFFE: Warum Iran und Deutschland Trump so nerven 26.09.2018:

Abby Bard of the Center for American Progress characterizes the speech in this way, which is consistent with my impression, in Trump's UN Speech Hurts America and the International System The National Interest 09/26/2018:

The speech sounded as if it could have been given by a dictator who wanted the world to know why other countries had no business interfering in their country’s repressive domestic policies and bore a striking resemblance to China’s “non-interference” policy. It’s particularly ironic and deeply disturbing that Trump has couched his speech in the language of equity and diversity given his promotion of white supremacist talking points and use of racist language against immigrants.

She also notes that Trump's "theory of sovereignty only appears to extend into the humanitarian realm."

But she also notes in relation to Trump's verbal attacks on Venezuela, include humanitarian concerns, that it seems forTrump, "human rights only matter when there is an economic gain for the United States."

Andrew Bacevich on the continuities in Trumpism

Historian Andrew Bacevich has a Niebuhrian view of public policy that gives his writing a sense of tragedy mixed with cautious hope.

In After Trump: The Donald in the Rearview Mirror TomDispatch 09/11/2018, he looks at the continuities of the Trump Era with its predecessors, seeing Trump in his way as being a normal product of the preceeding political and economic trajectory of the United States.

He does not mean it as a compliment.

Looking back to the immediate postwar area, which in retrospect we call the beginning of the Golden Age of Capitalism these days, Bacevich notes three "large facts" that defined the US reality: the gigantic industrial role of the country in the world economy; a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income (he actually calls it the distribution of "the benefits" of the economy); and, a broad pacifist sentiment.

The latter sounds especially surprising in 2018. But after the end of the Second World War, there really was a big hope and expectation from the American public that we needed peace and should try to avoid becoming involved in new wars. There was a big public demand to bring US troops home from abroad, to President Harry Truman's consternation. As Bacevich describes it, Americans "may not have been a peace-loving people, but they knew enough about war to see it as a great evil." Recogniying that war in itself is a great evil is the most appealing aspect of Niebuhrian realism.

But those three "large facts" of the postwar America are part of the past. The US is no longer the industrial powerhouse of the world in anything like the way it was in 1946. "Ours is increasingly a 'gig' economy," Bacevich writes, "which might be cool enough when you’re 25, but less so when you’re in your sixties and wondering if you’ll ever be able to retire."

Wealth and income distribution, of course, are radically more unequal today than in the postwar period. Republican Administrations promoted that outcome with deregulation and tax cuts slanted for the wealthy. So did the Democrats, if not quite so recklessly.

And, of course, today the government and the political parties and many ordinary citizens, too, accept constant war as normal rather than viewing war as a terrible though sometimes unavoidable evil:

By 2016, Americans had also come to accept war as normal. Here was “global leadership” made manifest. So U.S. troops were now always out there somewhere fighting, however obscure the purpose of their exertions and however dim their prospects of achieving anything approximating victory. The 99% of Americans who were not soldiers learned to tune out those wars, content merely to “support the troops,” an obligation fulfilled by offering periodic expressions of reverence on public occasions. Thank you for your service!

Bacevich developed that latter theme at length in his book, The New American Militarism (2005). And the trend wasn't interrupted by the Obama or Trump Administration.

Bacevich's Nieburhian perspective keeps in view the fallen state of humanity and the fragility of good intentions, particulary in foreign policy. This sometimes lends a fatalistic tone to his writing that makes me wish he would get a dose of Hegelian optimism. But he's not being cynical when he writes things like:

By the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodies had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics may see him as an abomination. But he is also one of us.

Yet as his article also makes clear, he is highly critical of Trump and very aware of his particular obnoxious traits. What he says about Trump's supposed "isolationism" in foreign policy is on point.

At the same time, he is emphasizing that there are deeper problems whose solutions depend on an activated citizenry. I don't know if that's Hegelian so much as Jeffersonian, but he is making a call for ordinary voters to be more engaged and to take on their responsibilities in a democracy:

The nation’s too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don’t shape the country; the country shapes the presidency -- or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate. Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole. ...

Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps -- or someone worse -- to come. [my emphasis]

Checking out the latest issue of "Foreign Affairs"

Even Foreign Affairs apparently can't resist a bit of both-sides-do-it-ism when it comes to Trump's foreign policy. The latest issue (97:133; 2018) has a piece by political scientist Randall Schweller, "Three Cheers for Trump's Foreign Policy: What the Establishment Misses." It's about as enthusiastic a praise for Trump's policies as you're likely to find this side of Rudy Giulani.

And totally superficial. He writes that Trump's "worldview is fundamentally realist in nature." This about a guy who is a serial fabulist.

Schweller also seems to be completely clueless as to even the basics of how the US trade deficit works.

I guess it's useful in that its probably a more coherent statement of praise for Trump's foreign policy than we're likely to see out of the White House. Certainly not from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

At least he doesn't talk about the Deep State. Instead he talks about "the Blob".

I think their standards at Foreign Affairs may be slipping a bit. Fun fact: Foreign Affairs first published 1910-1919 as The Journal of Race Development.

This tweet by Michael Toomey also works for me:

As soon as I thought about who would write something like this and get it published in Foreign Affairs, I clicked on the article and had my suspicions confirmed. Randall Schweller never fails to disappoint.

— Michael Toomey (@michaelfjtoomey) August 16, 2018

The issue also contains a piece by one-time End of History theorist Francis Fukayama, "Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy." It reads like it was phoned in. But it's a weighty piece compared to Schweller's Trumpist true-believer screed.

Fukayama's article is actually a highbrow piece of liberal concern trolling. With the requisite complaining about how Mean Libruls pushed all this here political correctness stuff and thereby created the Trump white nationalist movement. Also strangers-in-their-own-land sympathies for the white working-class voters who feel ignored by the Mean Libruls and it really hurts their feelings.

Until recently, activists on the left had little to say about the burgeoning opioid crisis or the fate of children growing up in impoverished single-parent families in the rural United States. And the Democrats have put forward no ambitious strategies to deal with the potentially immense job losses that will accompany advancing automation or the income disparities that technology may bring to all Americans.

Both of which can scarcely be addressed with Republican free-market extremism. But Fukayama spins it as a unique problem for the Democrats.

The Mean Libruls are to blame, you see.

Someone should really explain to poor Fukayama that white backlash against minorities, progress, and good manners has been going on since approximately the day of Marse Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

History may have resumed. But Fukayama doesn't seem to have lost his faith in the endless virtues of neoliberal economics.

Germany actively explores new international policy options in the face of Trump's erratic foreign policy

Other nations around the world are obviously faced with making significant adjustments in their foreign policy in response to the new orientations and the high level of uncertainty in the Trump Administration's foreign policy.

Christoph Schult writes about German moves in "Allianz der Gleichgesinnten," Der Spiegel 28.07.2018. He takes as a starting point a meeting that German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) had with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. Haas, writes Schult, proposed to Abe:

... stellt Maas dem japanischen Regierungschef seine Idee eines neuen Staatenbundnisses vor. Sie konnte das weltpolitische Vakuum fallen, das Trump hinterlässt. In den kommenden Monaten soll ein Netzwerk global orientierter Staaten geknüpft werden, das sich in der Außen-, Handels- und Klimapolitik eng abstimmt. »Wir brauchen eine Allianz der Multilateralisten«, sagt Maas, ein Bündnis also, das für jene globalen Regeln und Strukturen der Nachkriegsordnung eintritt, die Trump ablehnt. >»Der Klügere gibt nach< ware in diesen Zeiten die falsche Maxime«, sagt Maas.

{ ... his idea of a new alliances of states. It could fill the political vacuum that Trump has left. In coming months, a network of globally oriented countries that agree with each other in foreign, trade, and climate politicies will be liked together. "We need an alliance of mulitilateralists," say Maas. Meaning an alliance that will engage for the global rules and structures of the postwar [post Second World War] order that Trump rejects. "'The cleverer give in', would be the wrong maxim in these times," says Maas.}

Trump's recent statements represented a turning point, in Schult's reporting:

Spätestens seitdem der US-Präsident den Nato-Partnern beim Brüsseler Gipfel mit dem Rückzug aus der westlichen Verteidigungsallianz gedroht und wenige Tage später die EU als »Gegner« bezeichnet hat, hat sich in Berlin, Brüssel und Paris die Hoffnung zerschlagen, dass Allianzen Trump überhaupt etwas bedeuten. Die USA hatten sich vom »Ordnungsgeber« zum »Ordnungszerstorer« gewandelt, heißt es in der Bundesregierung.

{At least since the US President threatened the NATO partners at the Brussels summit that he would withdraw from the Western defence alliance and a few days later described the EU as an "enemy," hope has been destroyed in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris that alliances mean anything at all to Trump. The US has changed from being a "provider of order" to a "destroyer of order," say people in the German government.} [my emphasis]

This article reads very much like a trial balloon floated intentionally by government officials, not so much like actual investigative reporting. That's how the press works. But it's another public indication that EU and NATO governments are moving to protect themselves from Trump's European policy, which - intentionally or not - is very much in line with the efforts of Vladimir Putin's Russia to undermine both NATO and the EU.

Schult's piece mentions several countries that the German government considers possibly important partners in this effort: Canada, Mexico, France, South Africa, Australia, and Argentina. It's strikes me that Canada and Mexico have a strong national interest in taking some part in this effort. Martin Hesse writes elsewhere in the same Spiegel ("America first, Dollar second") notes that Trump's currency policy (or just blundering actions) could destablize the world financial system. So countries all over the world have reason to be carefully considering options.

Also in the same issue, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen gives a suggestion that a sort of stalling for time is also part of the Merkel government's perspective:

Diese Fixierung begleitet ihn ja schon über Jahrzehnte. Lange bevor er Präsident war, hat er bereits über deutsche Autos und deutsche Exporte gesprochen. Seine oft abfällige Art gegenüber Deutschland ist aber alles andere als typisch amerikanisch. Ich war bei meiner letzten US-Reise im Abgeordnetenhaus und im Senat und habe erfahren, mit welcher Leidenschaft sich die Amerikaner über Parteigrenzen hinweg zur Nato bekennen und wie sehr ihnen an der deutschamerikanischen Freundschaft liegt, die für viele nicht nur schone Erinnerung ist, sondern vor allem ein wichtiges Element der Zukunft unserer freien und toleranten Gesellschaften.

{This fixation [on Germany as an antogonist] is something that [Trump] has held for decades. Long before he was President, he had already spoke about German cars and German exports. But his often disparaging manner toward Germany is anything but typically American. On my last trip to the US, I was in the House of Representative and in the Senate and experienced with what passion the Americans across party lines recognized NATO and how much they valued the German-American friendship, which for many is not only a beautiful memory, but above all an important element of the future of our free and tolerant societies.}

She mentions that in those meeting with the Members of Congress, they made a point of recalling that Germany was the country that took the lead in formally invoking the NATO alliance over the 9/11 attacks and in support of the Afghanistan War.

She also has this to say about Russia's current position toward Europe:

Helsinki hat wieder gezeigt, dass Russlands Präsident Putin eine klare Strategie hat. Seine wirtschaftliche Schwache will er dadurch überspielen, dass er sich als globaler Player positioniert. Ein Mittel dafür ist auch, den Konsens der Atlantischen Demokratien, die Nato und die EU zu spalten. Eine klare Strategie des amerikanischen Präsidenten im Umgang mit Russland ist nach dem Treffen indes nicht zu erkennen.

{Helsinki [the Trump-Putin meeting] showed again that Russia's President Putin has a clear strategy. He wants to gloss over its economic weakness by positioning himself as a global player. One means for that is to try to split the consensus of the Atlantic democracies, the NATO and the EU. A clear strategy on the part of the American President in dealing with Russia, however, is still not apparent after the meeting.}

Von der Leyen also notes that Germany gets 9% of its energy from Russia. Considerably less than the 70% Trump claimed in one of his endless tweets.

NATO and Europe after the latest Trump shenanigans

Raimund Löw gives this evaluation of the state of relations between the EU/NATO countries and Trump's USA in Wie Donald Trump Europa zerstören will Falter 18.07.2018

Trump hat in Brüssel die niedrigen Rüstungsausgaben der Nato-Partner angeprangert. Angesichts seiner Annäherung an Russland fehlt dem Vorwurf die politische Logik. Dazu kommt: Höhere nationale Rüstungsbudgets lösen nicht das Hauptproblem, dass in Europa alle Armeen das Gleiche tun. Sie unterhalten alle ihre Panzer, Flugzeuge und Geschütze. Die militärische Arbeitsteilung ist trotz Nato und EU minimal. Das nationalstaatliche Denken beim Militär erhöht die Kosten und senkt die Effizienz.

Kein europäischer Nationalstaat könnte gegenwärtig im Ernstfall ohne US-Hilfe bestehen.

Politische Freiheiten, Gewaltenteilung und Pressefreiheit, für die der Westen steht, sind es wert, verteidigt zu werden.

Gefährdet werden sie von den eigenen autoritären Nationalisten, von Donald Trumps Amerika und den von Washington gesponnenen merkwürdigen Allianzen.

[Trump in Brussels demounced the low armaments expenditures of the NATO partners. In light of his rapprochement with Russia, the accusation lacks political logic. On that matter: Higher national defense budgets will not solve the main problem, which is that in Europe all the armies do the same thing. They all maintain their tanks, planes, and guns. But the military division of labor is minimal, despite NATO and the EU. The national-state thinking in military affairs increases the costs and reduces the efficiency.

No European national state could presently last in case of emergency without US help.

Political liberties, separation of powers, and freedom of the press, for which the West stands, are worth defending.

They are being endagered by our own authoritarian nationalists, by Donald Trump's America and by the strange alliances that Washington has knitted together.]

It's unlikely that Russia, which is relatively weak in conventional military power, has any real intention of annexing former Soviet Republics like Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, or the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But they actually did annex the Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. This kind of violation of legal national borders is a violation of international law. And the NATO countries have to take that seriously.

Then German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer gave what is one of the the best descriptions I've ever heard of the danger of belligerent nationalism when he was arguing for the NATO intervention in Kosovo. I supported that intervention at the time but the postwar view of the results made me highly dubious of its necessity or desirability, as I explained in James Galbraith on lessons of the Kosovo War 05/13/2004. And my view since then has only gotten more critical. But what Fischer said then is still worth noting:

Fischer made these comments on the PBS Newshour of 05/25/99 (the given link is now dead):

If you were to ask me a half year ago whether we [the governing coalition in Germany] would politically survive a bombing campaign of 60 days, I would say "never." We are now very united not only in Germany, but also in the alliance. I think this is a very positive result. On the other side, I mentioned it before, you must understand that in Germany, there is a trauma of the two world wars and especially in the older generation. Germany, for example, accepted much more refugees than all other countries. Why? Because many of us, my family is for 200 years lived in Budapest. We are ethnic Germans from Budapest. After-- in 1946, we were sent back like hundreds of thousands of other Germans to Germany after 200 years. So the experience to be displaced persons or refugees is very substantial in our people. So I mention that, that I think tradition and historical experiences, historical fears are very important. ...

I was a peace activist against colonial wars. But this is not a colonial war I think. This is an aggressive confrontation against aggressive nationalism. In the 30's, Milosevic would fit -- would have fitted wonderful in the political landscape of a fascist Europe and fascist means not only the extreme -- most extreme form of fascism of the Nazis. Mussolini, Franco and all the others. It's an aggressive nationalism and is believing in the right of its own people to attack, to fight for territory for whatever and to suppress others, the Balkans is full of this heritage. They all have their maps in their pockets. And these maps mean bloodshed and means real disaster. And Milosevic is acting in that way. And we cannot accept it. This would mean that Europe, the principals of Europe, of unification would be, I think, attacked and if Milosevic will win, others will follow in the Balkans and then we will have a real security problem. Therefore, he must be stopped. [my emphasis]

That applies to the Russian annexation of Crimea, as well.

Democrats at the moment don't like to hear it, but NATO's action in Kosovo, including recognizing Kosovo as an independent country, was one factor shaping Russian policy in Crimea. That does not justify it. And the referendum conducted there also does not justify annexing part of another country without that's country's agreement. Americans even half-familiar with the history of our own Civil War shouldn't need a lot of explanation about the problem with that idea. It's also a ploy that Britain has used and still uses today to justify holding illegal colonial possessions, including the Malvinas/Falkland Islands (Argentina) and Gibralter (Spain).

The smaller portions of territory in Ukraine and Georgia that Russia also de facto controls are practical measures from a Russian point of view to prevent the incorporation of either country into NATO. But those are also a problem, based as they are in part on the presence of ethnic/linguistic Russian populations in those areas. As Fischer said in 1999, "They all have their maps in their pockets. And these maps mean bloodshed and means real disaster." It's not only in the Balkans where that is so.

But Russia is the single biggest military security worry for NATO countries. And especially for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which were part of the former Soviet Union like Georgia and Ukraine and therefore viewed by Putin's government as a legitimate Russian sphere of influence. As a practiacl matter, every step of the post-1990 NATO expansion was dubious and risky, each one more than the others. But with the Baltic countries, NATO accepted countries that were atually part of the old Soviet Union. And did so apparently thinking that it was not such a big deal at all.

But it is. Even if it was a bad idea to incorporate them into NATO, there are NATO allies now. And if the Russians were to take part of their territory and NATO does not respond militarily to push them out, that would call into question that value of the NATO alliance, to put it mildly. As Löw puts it, Trump's approach already means, "Europa ist dabei, seinen weltpolitischen Anker zu verlieren. Der amerikanische Schutzschild über der Nato, inklusive der ehemaligen Sowjetrepubliken im Baltikum, gilt nur mehr halb." ("Europe is already on the point of losing its world-political anchor. The American protective shield over NATO, including the former Soviet republics in the Baltics, now only half applies.")

Trump's (alleged) turnaround on kidnapping immigrant children

Joshn Marshall and TPM have been carfully covering the Trump Administration's policy and practices of kidnapping immigrant children and babies on the border.

Josh makes this critical point, "There are many legitimate immigration related policy questions. But controlling crime or safety or security is simply not one of them. It’s the foundational lie of the entire immigration debate." (my emphasis; Trump’s Foundational Immigration Lie TPM 06/20/2018)

And he warns against taking Trump's publicity move today at face value (Trump’s Ploy TPM 06/20/2018):

The President says he’s signing an executive order to end family separations. The actual aim seems to be to pick a fight with the courts and allow separations to continue while blaming judges. According to The New York Times, the President will sign an executive order allowing children to be detained indefinitely with their parents. The problem is that that violates a 1997 consent decree saying that you can’t detain/imprison children for more than 20 days (technically what’s currently happening isn’t detention). It straight up violates that order. So what will almost inevitably happen is that a court will step in, say you can’t do that and then Trump will announce that the judge is forcing him to keep separating families. [my emphasis; internal links not included]

Trump blusters in all directions

Trump is a spaz. So it's hard to know which of his tweets to take seriously. Although since he is President of the United States, people do take them seriously, and for good reason.

Still, this is reckless and stupid for the President to be tweeting like this:

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

And it makes even more of a muddle when he tweets immediately afterward:

Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

A new major bombing strike or other kinds of US military escalation in Syria has a real risk of winding up in a direct confrontation of some kind or other between American and Russia military forces. Peter Beaumont warns:

... in diplomacy – especially the diplomacy of war – the niceties of language are employed in defence of the legal status of armed conflict between states. What is said – and how it is said – matters when justifying the use of force. In Trump’s remarks, the appeal to international law and ethics emerges as nothing more than an expression of his personal outrage, and the dangerous diplomacy of “ya, boo, sucks”. Perhaps we should not be surprised by such comments from a political leader who has long ignored the counsel of his own lawyers, and for whom the world appears as a binary struggle, with those challenging him portrayed with nicknames and in the crudest terms of otherness. ...

If a sense of escalation has been palpable in the past few days, first in the0 Russian threat to shoot down US missiles, then Trump’s knee-jerk response, what is clear is that in his tweet, Trump has dangerously widened the scope of the crisis, from frustration among the international community at Moscow’s shielding of Assad, to hinting at the possibility of a clash with Russia.

That plays into deeper and darker themes of a competition between Putin and Trump – both thin-skinned populist nationalists who have vowed to make their countries “great again”. Two men with fragile egos who have each yoked to their national ambitions.

And too many Democrats have preemptively restricted their ability to criticize Trump's recklessness in the Middle East by carrying on like it was 1959 about how Trump is way too soft on The Russians.

Trump and the Christian Right

Trump's popularity among people identifying with the Christian Right had provoked some amount of pundit pondering about whether Trump's various assaults on "conventional morality" in his own life will cause those voters to eventually get tired of him. Some of them seem bewildered that it hasn't already happened.

Those of us who have been following the Christian right for decades, on the other hand, are more likely to be amazed if that opinion shift actually did take place. Over ten years ago when the Cheney-Bush torture scandal broke, polls showed that those identifying with the Christian Right were the group of Americans most likely to support torture. Sadly, even that wasn't much of a surprise.

Frederick Clarkson explains this pro-Trump phenomenon in Christian Nationalism and Donald Trump Public Research Association 04/06/2018. He points out much of the mainstream press in 2016 was still missing some of the red meat Trump was feeding to the Christian Right:

... coverage of a speech at Liberty University in 2016, focused on whether Trump quoting a Bible verse as being from “two Corinthians” rather than the conventional “second Corinthians” would hurt him with religious voters. The gaffe caused students to laugh and certainly suggested he was unaccustomed to discussing the Bible. But Trump’s direct appeal to Christian nationalism immediately afterwards was met with applause––largely unnoticed in news reports. Trump said:

But we are going to protect Christianity. And if you look what’s going on throughout the world, you look at Syria where they’re, if you’re Christian, they’re chopping off heads. You look at the different places, and Christianity, it’s under siege. I’m a Protestant. I’m very proud of it. Presbyterian to be exact. But I’m very proud of it, very, very proud of it. And we’ve gotta protect, because bad things are happening, very bad things are happening...Other religions, frankly, they’re banding together and they’re using it. And here we have, if you look at this country, it’s gotta be 70 percent, 75 percent, some people say even more, the power we have, somehow we have to unify. We have to band together...Our country has to do that around Christianity.

Trump returned to his Christian nationalist theme when he returned to campus to deliver a Commencement address in May 2017. He cast himself as the defender of the faith and U.S. Christian identity:

In America we don’t worship government, we worship God...America is better when people put their faith into action. As long as I am your president no one is ever going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what’s in your heart. We will always stand up for the right of all Americans to pray to God and to follow his teachings.

For those outside the Christian Right bubble, it may seem fantastic to think that there is any serious danger of American Christians being denied their right "to pray to God and to follow his teachings."

On the other hand, if you think following God's teachings means discriminating against gays and lesbians, and Muslims and atheists, and liberals and scientists and teachers and, and, and ..., then it seems obvious.

Clarkson also links to several other pieces:

• Andrew L. Whitehead et al, Despite porn stars and Playboy models, white evangelicals aren’t rejecting Trump. This is why. Washington Post 03/26/2018
• Baylor Religion Survey, American Values, Mental Health, and Using Technology in the Age of Terror Sept 2017
• Paul Rosenberg, Donald Trump, defender of Christian America-- It’s not as ludicrous as it sounds Salon 04/01/2018

Trump's first SOTU

Here are some mostly cut-and-paste reactions to Trump's first State of the Union address yesterday.

Digby Parton noted the xenophobic emphasis of Trump's speech (Trump’s speech wasn’t the scary part: All the Republican groveling was Salon 01/31/2017:

Trump's main issue was the same as the one he ran on in 2016: immigration. And he has not softened his stance or his rhetoric at all. In fact, he has become even more xenophobic and is now pushing major curbs on legal immigration, which was not a central theme until recently. He paints legal as well as illegal immigrants as dangerous criminals and promises to end the long-standing policy of family unification. Immigrants actually commit crimes at a dramatically lower rate than native-born citizens, but Trump never lets facts get in the way of a good, lurid tale about how foreigners are ruining America.

Most depressingly, he framed the plight of the Dreamers as competitors with working-class (white) America, declaring "Americans are dreamers too." It's not the first time he's made clear that he doesn't like immigrants using that term because in his mind it's reserved for deserving Americans, but it was still jarring to hear all those Republicans shriek in ecstasy when he said it.

Charlie Pierce has made a couple of posts on the SOTU: the earlier one dramatic (I Watched a Ghoulish Masquerade in Washington Esquire Politics Blog 01/31/2018), the second more analytical (Trump Is Lost 01/31/2018).

Bernie Sanders gave a great response, here from his YouTube channel:

And a version commented on in real time by The Young Turks, STATE OF THE UNION 2018: Senator Bernie Sanders Response 01/30/2017):

A Kennedy that most people didn't remember hearing about before was selected for the Democrats' official response, Watch: Rep. Joe Kennedy delivers the Democratic response to the 2018 State of the Union 01/30/2018:

I didn't find it especially impressive. But Matthew Sheffield gives him a glowing review in State of the Union response: Joe Kennedy gives Democrats a taste of what they’ve lost since Obama Salon 01/31/2018.

Lee Fang calls this to our attention:

Joe Kennedy's largest donors this cycle include Goldman Sachs, Raytheon, and Cardinal Health, the opioid distributor company. https://t.co/Jc4qTdtHR3

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 31, 2018

Can we ignore Trump?

Political "framing" guru George Lakoff in a joint column withl his FrameLab podcast partner Gil Durán argues that Democrats have to get better at ignoring Donald Trump's daily provocations (Trump is using Twitter to manipulate the country. Here’s how to stop falling for it Sacramento Bee 01/04/2018):

Trump’s tweets are irresponsible and un-presidential. Yet the real problem is not Trump’s addiction to social media – it’s ours. Trump uses Twitter to control news cycles because the press, the political class and his Democratic opponents continually empower him to do so.

Every time Trump tweets, he can count on an instantaneous reaction. His tweet fixation fuels a parasitic economy in which people compete to ride his digital coattails. Reporters, Democratic politicians, and social media influencers fall for it every time. They obsessively retweet, analyze and attack. This helps Trump tremendously.

And they recommend an appealing alternative in general terms:

This doesn’t mean ignoring Trump. It means maintaining a steely focus on things that really matter, like the attack on our public institutions, the massive transfer of wealth and power to the rich, the resurgence of extreme racist politics, and the criminal investigation into the Trump Organization.

Let’s reclaim our power to decide what’s important. Let’s shrink Trump down to size. Let’s take away his power to control our brains.

But then, implementing such an approach is very complicated.

Because, as Michael Grunwald reminds us, "The point is that the crazy stuff Trump does is not a distraction from the important stuff Trump does. It’s important when the president does crazy stuff." (Donald Trump Is a Consequential President. Just Not in the Ways You Think. Politico 12/30/2017)

Or, as James Mann puts it (Damage Bigly New York Review of Books 12/21/2017; 01/18/2018 issue), "Other presidents have aspired to become moral leaders; Trump has become America’s chief thug." His rhetoric - maybe we should say his "shithole" rhetoric - is a big part of that. Supporters of democracy can't treat that as just a distraction. That's a key part of his political project. And, yes, that is a project of the Republican Party, even if Trump is a strikingly repulsive incarnation of it.

Any President of the US will be able have a major effect on the policy agenda and the political narrative of the country and even the world. The Trump narrative has to be countered in various ways on many fronts: debunking, ridiculing, arguing, condemning, rallying opposition, offering competing topics for the agenda.

Ignoring Trump is impossible. And would be irresponsible on the part of the Democrats and other opposition groups. Trump's agenda is destructive. So the opposition has to reframe it as destructive while offering their own issues to mobilize voters against the Republicans.

Mann reminds us that Trump's policies are having very much of a real-world effect way beyond the polluting and distracting nature of his Twitter output, notably the bandits' tax cut for the One Percent just enacted:

Before this bill, it might have been possible, though wrong, to argue that as president, Trump had brought to his office more sound and fury than action. ...

The sweeping tax bill gives a huge tax cut to corporations and to wealthy individuals ... It will widen further the already enormous gulf between the very wealthy and the rest of America. And it sets the stage for an attempt by Republicans in Congress in 2018 to shrink the federal deficit by cutting benefits to a large number of Americans through reductions in Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs.

The boundaries between words and actions can be especially difficult to perceive in foreign policy, which diplomatic signaling is so important and sometimes very high-stakes:

In cases where his policies aren’t entirely new, Trump’s style — his pattern of tweets and personal insults — has added a new dimension to them, with unpredictable results. The biggest foreign policy challenge of his first year came from North Korea’s rapidly developing nuclear weapons program. Trump’s threats to use force against North Korea were not a departure from past American policy; under the rubric of “coercive diplomacy,” previous administrations have also considered possible military action against North Korea. But Trump went a step further by taunting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, calling him “Little Rocket Man” not only in tweets but in formal settings including the United Nations General Assembly. He even threatened that he would “totally destroy” the country.

And, Mann concludes, "The longer he stays, the worse it will get."

"Charlottesville" as a reminder that the left and center-left need to contest historical interpretations

The transcript of Trump's instantly-infamous press conference on Tuesday is available from several sources, including Read the complete transcript of President Trump's remarks at Trump Tower on Charlottesville Los Angeles Times 08/15/2017. The press conference was physically located in Trump Tower in New York City.

But "Charlottesville" is now the name for an event. Like "Jackson State" or "Kent State" became symbols in 1970s as well as physical locations.

I've been trying this year to incorporate "synecdoche" and "metonymy." I think using "Charlottesville" to review to the confluence of events from the torch demonstration Friday night to (at least) Trump's both-sides press conference yesterday counts as a synecdoche, in which one element of something is used to represent the whole. (People more literate in linguistics than I am are welcome to correct me.) I would also say that "Charlottesville" qualifies as a "vacant signifier" in the sense in which Ernesto Laclau uses it in his political theory, a place name in this case, that had no particular national or international political significance has suddenly become a word signifying white supremacist terrorism and the defense of it and of white supremacists, the KKK and Nazis by the President of the United States.

Here is a Wednesday take from the Morning Joe crew, Joe: None Of Us Have Seen Anything Like Yesterday MSNCBC 08/16/2017:

There are a few groaners in that one, such as Jon Meachem wondering in good Pod Pundit fashion how the Republican Party got this way. A few hints Jon: Barry Goldwater, the Southern Strategy, "Build That Wall."

The head of the Our Revolution organization that emerged from Bernie Sanders' campaign discusses "Charlottesville" in this segment, Nina Turner Denounces the Enablers of Nazis The Real News 08/15/2017:

I'll mention a few good takes on the situation prior to Tuesday:

• Will Bunch, Trump's shameful moral void on Charlottesville leaves America without a leader Philadelphia Inquirer 08/13/2017
• Charlie Pierce, This Is the Bleakest Moment for America in my Lifetime Esquire Politics Blog 08/13/2017
• David Neiwert and The Investigative Fund, Home is where the hate is Reveal 06/21/2017 (Obviously, in June, "Charlottetsville" hadn't taken on the meaning it just did over this weekend.)

Charlie Pierce calls attention to an important feature of Trump's Tuesday press conference in Maybe Next Time Stick to the Notes Esquire Politics Blog 08/15/2017, focusing on this aspect of Trump's rant, from the LA Times transcript:

Those people -- all of those people -- excuse me. I've condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee. So -- excuse me. And you take a look at some of the groups and you see -- and you'd know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you're not, but many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson's coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you all -- you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop? But they were there to protest -- excuse me. You take a look, the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. ...

QUESTION: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same (inaudible)…

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So, will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down -- excuse me -- are we going to take down -- are we going to take down statues to George Washington?

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: OK. Good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what? It's fine. You're changing history. You're changing culture. And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You've got -- you had a lot of bad -- you had a lot of bad people in the other group. [my emphasis]

Pierce writes:

There's actually an interesting question buried in all that malarkey as to where to place the slaveholding of Washington, Jefferson and many of the rest of the Founders in our historical memory now that we're correcting the memory of the Civil War, monument by monument. (At Montpelier, the home of James Madison, the people in charge have been working hard for several years to honor the stories of the slaves that lived and worked there.) But that's not what the president* was getting at. He was bigot-signaling to his vaunted base that he would have been out there with a tiki torch himself. That's why we got all that talk about the very fine Nazis who were patrolling the park on Saturday night along with the Citronella SS, and who were treated so unfairly by the fake news media when they decided to go for throats.

And that's what takes Tuesday's explosion beyond the realm of simple mockery. There's an audience out there for every lunatic assertion the president* made. We saw it in full flower last Saturday. And he knows it's there, too. He knows that it's the one segment of the American population still guaranteed to give his fragile-if-monumental ego the constant boost that it needs. So he needed to salve all the fee-fees he wounded the other day when somebody dragged him out so he could say right out loud that being a Nazi is a bad thing. This was an angry, heartfelt appeal to his white nationalist base to stick with him, probably because that base is all he has left.

One of my longtime concerns is that the left and center-left do not contest American history thoroughly enough, given the ways in which the rightwingers invoke figures like Washington and Jefferson that have a mythical status for most Americans as Founders and pioneers of democracy.

I've expressed here more than once my frustration at the inability of the left and center-left to contest the democratic and, yes, revolutionary heritage of early and antebellum American history. I hope the left generally gets better at it.

Here is a recent post of mind on the Andrew Jackson part of that heritage, Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news 05/03/2017. Jackson, BTW, legitimately counts as a Founder; he fought in the Revolutionary War.

Trump makes "MS-13" a slogan of fear and hatred against Latinos and immigrants

Bundespräsident Von Trump spoke before a crowd of uniformed police in New York today, smearing Latinos as sadistic criminals and encouraging brutality and criminal behavior by the police. He used the longtime nativist bogeyman of MS-13 as his excuse. Trump discusses immigration and crime in New York PBS Newshour 07/28/2017:

His speech was basically white supremacist torture porn.

Hearing Trump as President in full Duterte mode today made me feel ill. Part of why his white supremacist fans love him is that he says things that upset Mean Libruls. And I assume that a majority of his white voters approve of seeing nonviolent immigrants brutalized and terrorized by ICE agents.

And why police sworn to uphold the law were applauding this is another reminder of how badly corrupted and lawless too many of our police forces have become.

The use of MS-13 at a symbol of and incitement to fear and hatred against Latinos was a popular theme among white supremacists since at least the early 2000s. Like various other themes, this one migrated from the white supremacist gutter to the position of the Republicans President.

MS-13 is a real gang, or a "brand" of gangs. But I won't stop to cite any reality-based sources here. In this speech, Trump uses "MS-13" as a ritual buzzword. I've focused lately on Islamophia in Austria. And one thing I took fromr a couple of extended TV panels featuring Muslim-hating participants was the way they made a point of tossing in a set of buzzwords: "jihad," "headscarves," "sharia," "salafi," "Saudi Arabia," "political Islam."

Tossing out "MS-13" along with torture-porn accessories functions in the same way: to promote fear and hatred rather than thought or understanding. And Trump is using it in this speech as a symbol against Latinos and immigrants.

Charlie Pierce tweeted a series of comments on Trump's speech:

We're back in American Carnage.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

President Endorses Police Violence.
Applause line.
Man, double-fck these people.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

Yes, organized crime never occurred to the previous waves of immigrants to this country.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

A linguist discovers that Trump talks like regular people

No, most 70-year-old men do not fantasize aloud about how he likes to "grab them by the pussy."

But a Georgetown University linguist, Jennifer Sclafani, has discovered that Trump's speeches make him sound like a reg'lur guy (Bastien Inzaurralde, This linguist studied the way Trump speaks for two years. Here’s what she found. Washington Post 07/07/2017):

“He is interesting to me linguistically because he speaks like everybody else,” said Sclafani, who has studied Trump’s language for the past two years. “And we’re not used to hearing that from a president. We’re used to hearing somebody speak who sounds much more educated, much smarter, much more refined than your everyday American.” ...

The features of Trump’s speech patterns include a casual tone, a simple vocabulary and grammar, repetitions, hyperbole and sudden switches of topics, according to Sclafani.

As for the criticism that Trump sounds erratic when he changes subjects in the middle of a speech or sentence, Sclafani said that “this is something that we all do in everyday speech.”

“It’s just unusual to hear it from a president speaking in a public, formal context,” she added.

There is an accompanying video. Sclafini presents her findings as some special insight into Trump's political appeal.

She has a book coming out about it, which will presumably contain considerably more analysis and detail.

But the WaPo article and video don't seem to me to say much more than: Trump uses conversational digressions in his political speeches, and everybody else also use conversational digressions in everyday speech.

But in terms of giving any insight into Trump's political appeal, I'm not sure that actually tells us anything. And I feel reasonably confident in saying that most people, at least most people not seriously intoxicated at the moment, don't typically speak this way, as the President did this week talking to journalists about his Big Beautiful Wall (Excerpts From Trump’s Conversation With Journalists on Air Force One New York Times 07/13/2017):

One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.

And I’ll give you an example. As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over. As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall.

I would think that a more fruitful way to inquire into the effectiveness of Trump's speaking style would be to look at its similarities to the typical type of rambling and ranting that is standard for Rush Limbaugh and other Republican talk radio pundits.

It's also worth asking why Trump's use of this idiom in political speeches was evidently more effective than Sarah Palin's use of it.

Smorgasbord: Trump, populism and an Argentine poet

This whole Russians-and-fake-news theme is going to work out poorly for the Democrats. Here are some interesting recent developments along that line:

Spencer Ackerman and Julian Borger, US legislation proposes new committee to counteract Russian 'covert influence' Guardian 11/30/2016. This is a link to the proposed legislation they discuss.

Julian Borger and Raya Jalabi, US Syria policy: signs of shift as Trump son meets pro-Russia Damascus figure Guardian 11/23/2016: this isn't necessarily sinister. But it's part of what will become a much bigger picture.

Christian Lowe and Natalia Zinets, Russia says foreign spies plan cyber attack on banking system Yahoo! Tech/Reuters 12/02/2016. Because cyberwar is such an arcane thing and is surrounded by secrecy and complicated by multiple agendas, it's very hard to know what to make of these reports. Because there are things like this: "The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News." (William Arkin, CIA Prepping for Possible Cyber Strike Against Russia NBC News 10/14/2016)

Marcy Wheeler, Seven Democrats Write Obama Asking Him to Declassify More Information on Russian Involvement in The Elections Emptywheel 11/30/2016. I hope the Obama Administration releases more substantial information on this. If he doesn't, it just makes the Democratic position on Russian interference in the election look even more like McCarthyist desperation.

On the continuing and lively discussion of populism, Mike Konczal (Learning From Trump in Retrospect Medium 12/01/2016) makes an important observation on how Trump rhetorically constructed the Elite against which he ran a populist campaign: "Trump never blames the rich for people’s problems. He doesn’t mention corporations, or anything relating to class struggle. His economic enemies are Washington elites, media, other countries, and immigrants. Even when financial elites and corporations do something, they are a combination of pawns and partners of DC elites."

There are some really good analyses out there evaluating the evolution of rightwing Republicanism into Trumpism and how to prepare for what's coming:

Rick Perlstein, Democracy and Indecency: From Nixon to Trump Washington Spectator 11/29/2016: "For me, 2007 was the watershed, not 2009: that was when I began stating as a matter of fact that millions of Americans now considered a government controlled by Democrats de facto illegitimate. "

Tina Dupuy, So We Elected an Autocrat: What To Do Now Medium ExtraNewsfeed 12/01/2016: "Really want to get under Trump’s liver-spotted thin skin? Call the movement [against him] The Popular Vote, its members The Popular Voters. At the time of this writing Hillary is leading in the popular vote by 2.5 million." Something tells me that "The Popular Voters" won't become one of Ernesto Laclau's "vacant signifiers" that catches on as the self-definition of a left populist movement. But who knows?

John Shattuck, Resisting Trumpism in Europe and the United States The American Prospect 12/02/2016: "The election of Donald Trump shows what happens when democracy misfires."

Hamilton Fish, White Grievance, Little Hyperboles, and the Coming Storm Washington Spectator 11/17/2016:

Yet, as ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis suggests in his masterful reporting from Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Trump voters are not always who we thought they were. MacGillis cites three common denominators—they live in places that are in decline, they lack strong attachments to either party, and they carry a profound contempt for a dysfunctional Washington. It’s a perverse tribute to the political skill of the Republicans, and an indictment of the inattentiveness of their audience, that the GOP could oppose every Obama initiative, bring the federal government to the edge of the precipice more than once, and still reap the support of those who were angry at the do-nothing Congress. For liberals, this runs parallel to their recognition that the greatest political achievement of the right is to have made their victims their most ardent supporters.

Daniel Engber, Does Fighting Racism Make Racists More Racist? Slate 12/01/2016 (My own short answer: white racists would certainly like you to think that!)

Joanthan Chait goes around the block to get back to a safe, comfortable assumption that the Trump Era won't be that different than anything that came before in The 2016 Election Is a Disaster Without a Moral New York 12/02/2016. And he repeats the it's-all-the-Rooskies-fault Democratic excuse that will come back to bite the Dems, "Clinton would have beaten Trump anyway, if not for the combined efforts of Russian intelligence and the FBI to bring her down."

John Dean takes a look at the Coming Consequences for the Litigious President-elect Trump Justia 11/11/2016:

Unlike any of his predecessors, President-elect Trump has “at least 75” open lawsuits, according to a nationwide study by USA Today. Just before his election on November 8, Trump threatened to sue all the women who claimed to have been sexually molested by him (some 12 women at last count), and several of them threatened to sue him for defamation for calling them all liars. In addition, as his campaign was winding down, several vendors whom he had used during the campaign, claimed they were confronted with his standard business practice of refusing to pay, so several of these people may soon file actions against him, if they are not paid. So, Donald Trump could enter the presidency with as many as one hundred active civil lawsuits, which will have potentially differing and multiple detrimental impacts on his presidency.

Either as a plaintiff or defendant, and Trump is on both sides, in any lawsuit requires time and effort to prepare oneself and one’s attorneys. It takes time and effort to testify at a deposition or during a trial. And it takes time and effort to stay abreast of the lawsuit. Given the fact that Trump may be the least qualified person to ever be elected president, he has much more work to do than most who seek and reach this high office. He does not even have a good newspaper knowledge of the way Washington works, let alone the presidency. It appears he has never read even a single biography of any of the men who preceded him as president, so he has a very steep learning curve. Throughout the campaign there have been reports that he has a very short attention span. Bottom line: His litigation is going to make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to meet his responsibilities as president. The smart move would be to settle these cases, but he may not have the money to do so. And he may be financially stretched to pursue them as well.

On a totally different topic, Felipe Pigna highlights a different article each day on his El Historiador website. Today he features José Mármol y su lucha contra Juan Manuel de Rosas. José Mármol (1817-1871) was a poet who opposed the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877), the Governor of Buenos Aires who was the main national leader of Argentina 1829-1832 and 1835-1852. Though Rosas' legacy is much contested, he was the leader who first established a national identity from various provinces of the previous Spanish Vice Regency of Rio de la Plata.

Rosas, "The Exterminator of Anarchy"

Mármol was associated with the cause of the Unitarians - a political designation, not a religious one, they were basically all Catholics. Rosas was part of the Federalist party. Mármol's most famous work is Amalia (1855), which is set in the context of the violent political struggles during the Rosas period. It still stands as a major work in Argentine literature.

I should start doing Argentine History Mondays or something like that on a regular basis.

Trump and foreign policy credibility

Paul R. Pillar takes a sober look at The Post-Truth President and U.S. Credibility The National Interest 11/30/2016:

There are many other sad things that could be said about the consequences for those workings of having a leader with so little regard for truth, which encourages further entrenchment of falsehood in politics and public affairs. In this respect Trump is both a symbol and arch-facilitator of a malevolent trend that led the Oxford English Dictionary to make “post-truth” its word of the year.

I'm always leery when people start talking about the importance of "credibility" in foreign affairs, because it's typically used as a reason to initiate or escalate military interventions for the sake of "American credibility."

But that doesn't mean it has no place in the foreign policy vocabulary. Pillar notes:

At stake is not just the reputation of any one occupant of the White House. The credibility of the U.S. president affects the credibility of the United States. And the perceptions that matter are those held not only by foreign governments but also by foreign publics. A reputation for lying by the person at the top exacerbates what are already widespread and unhelpful tendencies of many people overseas not to believe what the United States says are its reasons for its actions overseas. This is especially a problem in the Muslim world; in this instance with Trump, the deleterious complementarity is between his lying and his Islamophobia.

And he explains, referencing the problematic use of "credibility" for warmongering:

The threat to U.S. credibility involved here is far more real than the supposed threat that often is posited: that if the United States does not immerse itself in this or that conflict that is peripheral to its interests, then other governments will not believe that the United States will stand up for its interests elsewhere. That is not how governments calculate credibility. U.S. credibility depends not on intervening in what is peripheral but instead on U.S. leaders being believed when they say something is vital.

Pillar cites an article by Dan Drezner () in his he says, "Ultimately, Trump’s bluster and impulsiveness will hurt our national interest."

That's a good summary for what will surely be a very big problem the next four years.

Drezner says again, with understatement, "Trump’s lack of concern for facts, and his tendency to parrot whichever adviser spoke with him last, will pose a challenge for diplomats and foreign heads of state."

Drezner mentions this factor, which is one of the reasons I'm cautious about claims of alleged Putin support for Trump:

As for Trump’s newfound friendships with kindred leaders such as Vladimir Putin, one should expect them to be about as long-lasting as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Russia and the United States share some common interests, but not a lot of them. Given the temperaments of Trump and Putin, it would not be hard to envision the relationship spiraling out of control if one of them thinks he’s been wronged. Being hot-headed as a tactic only works if other leaders are not hot-headed in response. The very leaders most like Trump — Putin, Rodrigo Duterte of the PYeah, he Philippines, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan — are the ones most likely to respond to anger with anger, escalating any dispute.

"Página/12" (Argentina) reacts to the US Presidential election

The Argentine paper Página/12 ran an unsigned article on Wednesday after the American Presidential election, Trump dio el batacazo e hizo temblar al mundo 09.11.2016:

Esta elección marcó, acaso, el final de una época. El mundo adopta lentamente una nueva configuración, alejándose de los consensos que marcaron el final de la guerra fría y la trancisión entre el siglo XX y el siglo XXI. Los desafíos son inéditos, para los Estados Unidos y para el mundo que deberá lidiar con esta nueva iteración de la superpotencia, en manos de un hombre sin experiencia en política internacional, administración pública ni defensa. Lo que hay en el futuro son muchos más interrogantes que respuestas. Durante un año y medio el planeta se preparó para esta elección pero lo que sucedió anoche no parece un final sino más bien un comienzo, un comienzo de algo peligroso.

[This election perhaps marks the end of an era. The world is slowly adopting a new configuration, abandoning the consensus that marked the end of the Cold War and the transition between the 20th century and the 21st. The challenges are unprecedented, for the United States and for the world that it will be obliged to lead with this new iteration of its superpower status, in the hands of a man without experience in international politics, public administration or defense. What there will be in the future are lots of questions without answers. The planet prepared itself for this election for a year and a half. But what happened last night doesn't look like an ending but more like the beginning, a beginning of something dangerous.]

A small smorgasbord on the Trump mystery

We're still hashing over Ronald Reagan's 1980 Presidential win. So we'll be talking about what happened on Tuesday for a long time.

DiEM25 is the leftist activist association of which former Greek Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis is a prominent leader. It's pro-EU but anti-austerity and pro-Keynesianism. This is an official statement from DiEM25 on the US Presidential election which has the written-by-committe flavor typical of such pronouncements these things typically, but its perspective is notable, Trump’s Triumph: DiEM25 on how progressives must react 11/06/2016:

Donald Trump’s victory marks the end of an era when a self-confident Establishment preached the end of history, the end of passion and the supremacy of a technocracy working on behalf of the 1%. But the era it ushers in is not new. It is a new variant of the 1930s, featuring deflationary economics, xenophobia and divide-and-rule politics. ...

The Establishment’s folly is causing its demise. Unable to come to terms with the economic crisis they created, they crushed the Greek Spring because they could. They pushed the majority of British families into austerity-induced hopelessness. They committed millions of Germans to mini-jobs. They conspired to keep Bernie Sanders at bay. And when Golden Dawn, Brexit, the Alternative für Deutschland and Donald Trump were the result, they responded with a mixture of condescension, denial and panic.

Politics is undergoing a shake up that the world has not seen since the 1930s. A Great Deflation is now gripping both sides of the Atlantic, re-kindling political forces that had been dormant since the 1930s. President Trump’s use of Mussolini-like tactics and narratives is a mere symptom of the rendition of that bleak era.

I'm not sure that Great Deflation quite applies right now, at least in the US. But that's been the condition in the eurozone "periphery" countries for years.

Michelle Goldberg gives her take on the Trump vote in a post whose title suggests a less nuanced view than she's taking, Donald Trump’s Victory Proves That America Hates Women Slate 11/09/2016. It includes this memorable observation:

As those of us opposed to Trump and Trumpism absorb the trauma of what happened in America last night, there are going to be vicious recriminations on the left. I don’t begrudge any Bernie Sanders supporters the consolation of thinking that their man could have saved us from this calamity. All of us are grieving, trying to make sense of the worst thing to happen to our country in modern history. All I can say is that I’ve been to Trump rallies in the midwest, south, and northeast, and I never saw a single sign or T-shirt about free trade. I never heard chants about NAFTA or TPP. What I heard was Trump That Bitch and Build That Wall. When Clinton delivered her heart-shredding concession speech, traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange reportedly booed and chanted 'Lock her up!' They know Trump’s victory was no rebellion against Wall Street.

Madame Beloved looks at several variants of Trump supporters in A Typology of Trump Voters Medium.com 11/09/2016

Thomas Frank shares his early take in Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there Guardian 11/09/2016. Frank is always worth reading. But in this one his annoyance at general Democratic Party hackery seems to be leading him to minimize the extent to which the mainstream media's anti-Clinton habits came strongly into play. They did hype the e-mails story and let rightwing Republican partisan FBI Director James Comey yank their chains in a pitiful way.

But here he describes an important aspect of the Trump-Clinton contest:

... she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest.

Also from the Guardian, Paul Mason looks at the Trump puzzle in Globalisation is dead, and white supremacy has triumphed, arguing, "this is not some two-dimensional revolt against poverty and wage stagnation. It is a three-dimensional revolt against the impacts of neoliberalism – both positive and negative."

Trump's election and major threats to American democracy

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about the outcome of the Presidential election. Because I assume it's obvious to everyone that in two months, the inmates will officially take charge of the asylum.

But I do know the incoming President made it a central campaign promise to deport all undocumented immigrants. Like on most everything, he was vague and sometimes self-contradictory on that. But he did promise that he would make a two-year push to deport them all. He explicitly referred to the deportation program under President Eisenhower, which was literally called Operation Wetback. It was a brutal operation that directly resulted in numerous deaths. And that was under Dwight Eisenhower, who in Republican terms then was considered a moderate or even a liberal.

That also involved about two million people forced out of the country. Today it is commonly estimated that there are 11-12 million, playing a far more significant role in the economy. American agriculture is almost completely dependent on *undocumented* labor. I've seen one historian claim that expelling 12 million people would be the largest forced migration in all of history. I don't know how it may rank in the Guiness Book of Humanitarian Horrors. But it would involve a lot of very real horror. Trump very recently promised that immediately after inauguration he would deport 2 million "criminal" immigrants.

For a bit of history on Project Wetback, see: Joshua Keating, Trump Praises Eisenhower’s Deportation Program, Fails to Mention It Was Called “Operation Wetback” Slate 11/10/2015; John Dillin, How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico Christian Science Monitor 07/06/2006.

Pilar Marrero in Incrédulos, grupos pro inmigrantes prometen “resistir” ante una presidencia Trump La Opinión 09.11.2016:

Donald Trump fue electo presidente de los Estados Unidos de América, sobre una plataforma que incluyó la promesa de deportaciones masivas, la construcción de un gran muro entre Estados Unidos y México y el reforzamiento del sistema policial fronterizo, triplicando la cantidad de agentes de inmigración y anulando medidas ejecutivas de ayuda a los inmigrantes.

[Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America on a platform that included the promise of massive deportations, the construction of a big wall between the United States and Mexico and the reinforcing of the frontier police system, tripling the number of immigration agents and annuling executives measures to support immigrants.]

And she writes, "los grupos que por años han luchado contra las deportaciones y la militarización de la frontera, y por una reforma migratoria, buscan reagruparse y comenzar una lucha que se presenta titánica" ("the groups who have been fighting for years against deportations and the militarization of the frontier, and for immigration reform, are seeking to regroup and to begin a fight that appears to be titanic").

There is also the very real effect of systematic, segregationist voter-suppression efforts targeting especially black and Latino voters. Rick Perlstein summed up the state of play on those recently in GOP Voting Fraud Squads Are Nothing New Washington Spectator 11/04/2016.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to immediately evaluate those, as this article by Justin Elliott notes, What We Don’t Know: The Full Effect Of Voter Suppression and Voter ID Laws ProPublica Electionland 11/08/2016:

As journalist Ari Berman, who covers the voting rights beat, pointed out today, this is the first presidential election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder invalidated federal oversight of states with a history of voting discrimination.

But quantifying exactly how much the changes have depressed turnout is nearly impossible.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to measure the effects of voter ID laws,” says David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. That’s because, Becker notes, “it’s incredibly hard to know who’s choosing not to vote because of barriers.”

But "not easy" is far from meaning "impossible." There are ways to determine the effects of voter suppression, as the Justice Department did in the early 1960s in court challenging segregationist voter suppression laws then.

Ari Berman, who is quoted there, has been doing great work reporting on this nefarious practice in its various forms. He explained in a piece in May the stakes involved, Voter Suppression Is the Only Way Donald Trump Can Win The Nation/Moyers & Company 05/10/2016:

Unless there’s an unexpected turnaround in his terrible numbers among nonwhite and young voters, there’s only one way Trump can win the general election: by massively suppressing Democratic voters or hoping they don’t show up on Election Day. Trump could do this by supporting new voting restrictions adopted by GOP-controlled states (17 have new restrictions in place for the first time in 2016), urging his supporters to create chaos at the polls and running a breathtakingly negative campaign that demobilizes his opposition.

Trump’s support in the primary directly correlated with racial resentment toward African-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims. “The higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump,” wrote Tom Edsall in The New York Times. It’s not a stretch to imagine Trump supporters trying to block these same voters from the polls.

We probably won't have a decent picture of how that worked in yesterday's election for a while. As Ari noted there, "Studies have shown that restrictions like voter-ID laws can reduce voter turnout by 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drop-off among young, first-time and African-American voters."

Then there is campaign-financing system, which the Republican-dominated Supreme Court made orders of magnitude worse with their Citizens United decision. I wrote just after that decision in 2010:

President Obama addressed the issue in his weekly address on 01/23/09 01/23/2010, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People. As they often do, many of the words sound right (my emphasis):

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

But will he fight for real solutions? Sadly, he pleaded for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama administration and the current Senate leadership at least an offer of preemptive surrender.

We currently have one Party, the Republicans, who are both strongly partisan and willing to fight for their goals. We have another Party, the Democrats, who are lukewarm partisan and not notably willing to fight for the goals that are most important to their Party's own base and to the majority of the people.

Sadly, the Party that is made up of fighting partisans has also become an authoritarian Party hostile to democracy and the rule. (See Bush v. Gore, the Cheney-Bush torture policy, to take two examples among many.)

It really is remarkable for the President of the United States to say of a Supreme Court decision:

This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.

But those words at this particular moment in time remind me of what's been so gut-wrenching disappointing to even Democrats like me, who never viewed Obama as some kind of democratic messiah. His actions haven't matched up to the urgency of his words.

There will be a lot to say about the 2016 election. For a long time. But this are some of the most urgent issues that stand out for me on the morning after.

1963 and 2016: fanatical segregationists creating their own version of reality

James Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society, originally published in 1964, was an important and influential book on segregation and the civil rights movement in Mississippi. And about the 1963 riot at Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) when James Meredith was admitted as the first African-American student. (At least knowingly admitted as such. At least one black student had "passed" as white in attending Ole Miss in 1945-6 on a Navy study program.) The University of Mississippi Press issued a new edition of Silver's in 2012.

Since the national Republican Party has "Mississippized" itself in the sense of 1964 - maybe "Ross Barneettized" would be a better term after the treason-minded governor that instigated the Ole Miss riot - Silver's description of the social context and mentality of segregation among whites has newly contemporary relevance.

The night of insurrection at Ole Miss has been called the most explosive federal-state clash since the Civil War. Before the work was done, the Army brought more troops to Mississippi than General Washington had ever commanded at one time, and almost as many as General Sherman had had in the environs of Oxford exactly 100 years before. Several hundred reporters from all news and interpretative media concentrated on the Mississippi campus to ferret out the facts about what had actually taken place and to inquire into the background of the state's turmoil. By and large the reporting was accurate and the interpretation sound and temperate. Those who wished to know have had spread before them a reasonably trustworthy record of events.

This is true for all the world except Mississippi. With their long history of being on the defensive against outside criticism, and with their predisposition to believe their own leaders can do no wrong, the people have been almost completely deceived. The closed society intuitively and immediately projected (in fact, it had foreshadowed) the orthodox version that the insurrection came as the inevitable result of federal encroachment, deliberately planned by the Kennedys and callously incited by [federal Chief Marshal] McShane when he called for tear gas. What did happen in front of the Lyceum Building in that crucial hour before eight o'clock on the night of September 30? Truth cries out that the orthodox Mississippi view is false, that cleverness in shifting the culpability for defiance of law from those creating the violence to those enforcing the law could only succeed among a people suffering from a touch of paranoia. [my emphasis]

Silver notes that there were calls by Mississippi officials for indictment of McShane and other federal officials. White segregationists were very concerned to maintain "law and order" when it came to black people. But they were not hesitant to condemn law-enforcement officials who were demanding that white rioters conduct themselves according to the law. White Lives Mattered to Mississippi segregationists.

Silver addresses the use of tear gas:

Whether Chief Marshal James P. McShane was justified in giving the order to fire at precisely the moment he did is a question for the professionals to answer. It is relevant, however, that between 40 and 50 faculty members and their wives later testified that the marshals had undergone for at least an hour a constant harassment of obscene language and a minute-by-minute heavier barrage of lighted cigarette butts, stones, bottles, pieces of pipe, and even acid. It is a small matter whether the gas should have come fifteen minutes earlier or later, but it is rather ironic that a full-scale insurrection should get under way at the exact moment that the President was appealing to Mississippians on radio and television for fair play, in the name of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar. [my emphasis]

I've previously described L.Q.C. Lamar as "a genuine villain who conned gullible Yankees with his 'moderate' talk while fighting for white supremacy and against democracy." JFK had made Lamar one of his "profiles in courage" in his famous book.

Dealing with Ross Barnett, in particular, though, showed Kennedy that his conservative view of Reconstruction was probably deeply flawed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978) quotes John Kennedy from 06/20/1963 commenting specifically on the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers: "I don't understand the South. I'm coming to believe that [Radical Republican Reconstruction-era Congressman] Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them."

"Them" in this case being hardcore Southern segregationists.

Silver rightly notes, "The President had no alternative except the use of federal power when the execution of the order [to admit Meredith] was prevented by state force." That authority was clarified during the Civil War. But even in 2016, their are still political descendants of John Calhoun who would reverse that verdict. Unless they wanted to use federal troops against black communities, immigrants or labor, of course.

Schlesinger also provides this transcript of a telephone conversation between the Governor of Mississippi and the President of the United States:

BARNETT. That's what it's going to boil down to - whether Mississippi can run its institutions or the federal government is going to run things ....
KENNEDY. I don't understand, Governor. Where do you think this is going to take your own state?
BARNETT. A lot of states haven't had the guts to take a stand. We are going to fight this thing. . . . This is like a dictatorship. Forcing him physically into Ole Miss. General, that might bring on a lot of trouble. You don't want to do that. You don't want to physically force him in.
KENNEDY. You don't want to physically keep him out. ... Governor, you are a part of the United States.
BARNETT. We have been a part of the United States but I don't know whether we are or not.
KENNEDY. Are you getting out of the Union?
BARNETT. lt looks like we're being kicked around - like we don't belong to it. General, this thing is serious.
KENNEDY. It's serious here.
BARNETT. Must it be over one little boy - backed by cominunist front - backed by the NAACP which is a communist front? ... I'm going to treat you with every courtesy but I won't agree to let that boy to get to Ole Miss. I will never agree to that. I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.
KENNEDY. I have a responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States .... The orders of the court are going to be upheld. As I told you, you are a citizen not only of the State of Mississippi but also of the United States. Could I give you a ring?
BARNETT. You do that. . . . Good to hear from you. [my emphpasis]

Silver's account is also a reminder that rightwing whining about the so-called liberal press has been around for a while:

In the more than a year since then [the riot], politicians, editors, judges, lawyers, educators, churchmen — all the makers of public opinion — have continued the hypocritical tirade of misrepresentation and deceit. It does impress people who are attuned to hearing nothing else and want to hear nothing else. In the 1963 campaign, every gubernatorial candidate started out with a deep hatred for the Kennedys, and the man who screamed the loudest is now Mississippi's governor. While warming up in Florida for the main event, Paul Johnson, then lieutenant governor, spoke on the subject, "The Cause of Freedom Won at Oxford and We Have Just Begun to Fight." President Kennedy, it would seem, had tried "to subvert the foundation pillars of this great government," backed by a "kept segment" of national press, television, and radio grinding out "its slanted story, half truths and prejudiced propaganda." [my emphasis]

And the unwillingness of those fabled moderate Republicans to stand up against Trump and his overt white supremacist Presidential campaign also has a familiar ring to those who have some knowledge about Mississippi-style segregation. Silver writes:

There are moderates in Mississippi who look upon the future with some degree of optimism because increasing numbers of colored citizens are becoming eligible to vote. Unquestionably the promise of tomorrow has some merit, but not because of the assistance of [white] men of good will. The voter registration drives are all conducted by local Negroes and "outside agitators" of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, NAACP, and other organizations. In the courts the chief defender of firstclass citizenship for colored Mississippians is the U.S. Department of Justice. The Mississippi Civil Rights Advisory Committee, which seeks to protect the rights of all Mississippians, has found it well nigh impossible to recruit members.

The most unreasonable and cruel tirade James Meredith had to endure came from a [Memphis] Commercial Appeal columnist. Having, at least privately, expressed some sympathy for a much-maligned individual, this man of good will pounced upon Meredith's first apparent false step (his criticism of the U.S. Army), denouncing him as an "ignoble failure" who had betrayed his race and damaged its reputation beyond calculation. The column was filled with innuendo, falsehood, and bad judgment. Its author, who laid claim to an "overload of grief, compassion and charity," demonstrated hp had none of these qualities when he refused to rectify in any way his character assassination of an innocent man. Once again, the pious, self-righteous man of irresponsibility had failed miserably, even in a mild crisis. [my emphasis]

To quote Arlo Guthrie, "Some things change, you know. Some things don't."