March 2016 Archives

Dear America,

Given Republicans' commitment to the notion that the United States is exceptional, I find myself wondering what they think about the international image of the United States projected by their candidates for president.  I suppose Kasich doesn't diminish our prestige, although he is reputed to be nothing like the benign persona he is attempting to sell on the campaign trail.  He is reported to have a temper that shows in vitriolic response to those who disagree with him, and his constant touting of accomplishments that are creditable not just to him, but to the bodies in which he served, like the House of Representatives, or to the passage of budgets by the legislature that his only roll in was to sign while governor of Ohio, seems like undignified self-promotion.  And self-promotion is unsavory no matter whether Kasich does it or Donald Trump does.

And speaking of Trump and self-promotion, which is practically Trump's middle name, he is still rambling on about the size of his hands, and even then he can't forego self-promotion, his latest comment on the subject being that when he buys gloves, he buys them just smaller than large...in other words, medium.  And to go with such crass attempts to convince his female constituents that he can satisfy them not just politically by in other ways as well, there is his new war with his closest Republican rival, Ted Cruz, about their respective wives.  It started with a super-pac publishing an old photo of Trump's wife, and ended with Trump blaming Cruz for it and threatening to "spill the beans" on Cruz's wife.  No one knows what beans Trump is talking about, but Cruz had the good sense not to prolong the exchange by simply decrying it as impolitic.  And then there's Cruz.

This guy claims not to have a temper unless seriously provoked, but he wants to carpet-bomb Syria and Iraq in order to destroy ISIL.  I guess he has abandoned the "kinder, gentler" credo espoused by some of his predecessors in favor of Ronald Reagan's strategy of swaggering through the world showing everyone looking in his direction a "big stick."  To listen to the current Republican candidates is to be transported back to the high school cafeteria to watch a food fight.  I am used to leaders who demonstrate at least some semblance of sophistication and restraint--though he demonstrates them to a fault, Barrack Obama does so--but if the Republicans have their way, the world will see our puling, boasting, worst side every time it looks toward the White House.  I don't believe in pride; I was taught that it is a sin, though in this putatively Judeo-Christian country it seems now to be not just a virtue but a measure of patriotism.  But I am embarrassed that the world can see the worst of us every time a Republican gives a speech. 

I remember what I was thinking when Silvio Berlusconi, then the Prime Minister of Italy, got in trouble in Italy with his invitations to minors to come and participate in his cocktail parties and his consorting with both movie stars and young women of suspect profession.  He was such a caricature...such a buffoon.  He smiled as he was being convicted of tax fraud, and he seemed to revel in the exposure of his constant indulgence in escapades worthy of frat boys, but to be eschewed by politicians seeking to project respectability in any other country.  What would constitute a scandal anywhere else in Europe was a badge of distinction to him, and on that account, it seemed that the whole world was laughing at both Berlusconi and Italy for reelecting him at the peak of his profligacy.  But he is gone from the scene now, and the world needs someone new to laugh about, so in walks Donald Trump.  But this time, it won't be a hapless country like the one that lost a war to Ethiopia during the World War II era, it will be the United States.  And while we lost wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, and we're still in the process of losing one in Afghanistan, we had allies in each case who thought it was a good idea to fight them.  It is not the country that makes the Fiat, but the one that makes Cadillacs and Corvettes.  But it also won't be the country that makes fine silk and designer suits; it will be the country that used to.  It won't be the country in which the leaning tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower were constructed, it will be the one in which the Trump Tower was built to memorialize out own Ozymandias, who unfortunately might wind up being as prominent as Berlusconi was, and maybe some day will be so for some of the same reasons.

Maybe we need a Trump presidency to demonstrate to our collective satisfaction that we are not superior to every other nation by dint of American Exceptionalism.  Maybe President Trump could teach us that all nations are exceptional...just sometimes for all the wrong reasons.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Once when I was in my twenties, my father, who was a young man living with his family in Austria when the Germans marched in to occupy the country, told me that the way in which Richard Nixon was galvanizing his constituency--the silent majority--was just like what Hitler did in the twenties and thirties in Germany.  The fear of other nations and ideals--in Nixon's case, primarily communists, the Soviets and the North Vietnam--was directly analogous to Hitler's vilification of the former Allies for the national penury caused by the peace those nations extracted from Germany and the continuing status as European pariah that plagued post-war Germany.  But, Nixon did not turn out to be another Hitler, whether he wanted to be or not, and the United States continued in its democratic tradition, electing both liberals and conservatives over the past forty years, right up until the present.  But the ascendancy of Donald Trump raises the same specter in my mind that Nixon's rise precipitated in my father's, but I think with an even closer parallel between Trump and Hitler than may or may not have existed between Nixon and Hitler back in the sixties and seventies.  The paranoia and fear are roughly the same, and Trump, like Nixon, seems inclined to retaliate against anyone who disagrees with him without any constraint based on scruples, but there is a sharper verisimilitude that I see as striking, and it didn't begin with Trump, though he is playing into it with the adroitness of aspiring dictators and demagogues everywhere.

Trump didn't invent the notion that America is superior to all other nations and that the American ethos is superior to all other national cultures.  The first time I heard the phrase "American exceptionalism" was when Newt Gingrich said it during a Republican debate in 2007 or 2008.  Gingrich didn't invent the idea, but he used it in a fashion that rendered it a kind of praise when as it turns out, its origins were in writings that were anything but complimentary.  The most common attribution of the concepts behind American Exceptionalism is to Alexis de Tocqueville, who said in his work Democracy in America that we Americans were not distracted by higher pursuits of an intellectual nature because our focus was on more practical matters, and because all the deep thinking was already being done in Europe.  Nearly a hundred years later, Stalin used the precise term, American Exceptionalism, in criticizing the United States and attributing the depression started by American capitalism to our lofty self-esteem and the limitations of our national character.  But regardless of the origins of the term, Trump's claim that he can "make America great again," implying that it is something less because of the frailty of our political leadership, is resonating, and as in the Reagan years, a certain element of American society is being galvanized by its own pridefulness without contemplation of the origins...the negative context in which the idea of American exceptionalism was spawned, but rather out of a kind of national conceit that has become acceptable despite the fact that our purported Judeo-Christian ethos condemns pride as a sin.  The lack of a distinction between pride and conceit seems lost on Trump supporters, and for that matter on many Americans who prefer status to virtue.  And this appeal to pridefulness that Trump intentionally indulges in runs parallel to Hitler's strategy in another stark way.

You may recall that Hitler justified what we now know to be genocide by claiming that the German Arians were a "master race," and that they should therefore be dominant in the world as a matter if right.  And his use of such a rhetorical flourish was a sine qua non for his rise to power because it essentially affirmed the pride of the German people at a time when Europe, and the United States for that matter, had driven Germany to ruin and hopelessness, Hitler making himself the embodiment of a retreat from that national abyss.  He created a national automobile industry with the peoples' car, the Volkswagen, and he brought German science to a pinnacle of accomplishment by investing in military research and technology as well as in, it turns out, eugenics, with fascist principles, and another set of ideas as well. I have lately heard that German study of eugenics occurred to Hitler as a function of the American dalliance in the odious practice as exemplified by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes' majority opinion in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell--a case about the mandatory sterilization of a young woman approved in that U.S. Supreme Court decision--which concluded with the sentence, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."  Thus, heretical as it may seem, the parallel between the concept of a master race and American exceptionalism is worth at least mentioning, and thus, Trump's connection to the latter justifies the pause it has given those who oppose him.

We have come a long way in the wrong direction in my opinion, and also in my opinion, it started with saint Ronald Reagan, who wasn't shy about claiming a rightful place at the pinnacle of human governance for the United States.  From that came wars of proseletysm for American democracy, both overt and sub rosa, in Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan as both a patron on the Mujahadeen and in our own name, and twice in Iraq, all inspired by our unbridled belief in our own virtue.  Trump is the current prime exponent of that misguided ethos, and if we are at all unlucky, he'll be our president.  What misadventures will then ensue I dread to think about.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The Catholic sacrament of confession is premised on the belief that confession cleanses the soul.  I am not Catholic, but I also believe that confession has a cathartic, soothing capacity, so I'm going to take this opportunity to do so.  I committed to voting for Bernie Sanders when he announced, both in the primaries and in the general election, but I had been wavering lately because of fear that he had less of a chance of beating Donald Trump or Ted Cruz than Hillary Clinton did.  Given the menace that those two represent--a stark raving egotist and a stark raving conservative--I was willing to be pragmatic in the spirit of patriotism and vote for her.  Though she is flawed with the same kind of expediency as her husband was, she isn't that bad...certainly not as bad as Trump and Cruz.  And I would have voted for Sanders anyway, I think, but with trepidation, and thus, I wavered.  But Bernie won Michigan yesterday: a surprise, upset result.  Then this morning, I looked up the most recent general election polls, and I was shocked, but very pleasantly surprised.  CNN's poll indicates that Bernie Sanders would do better in the general election than Hillary Clinton, whom the poll shows as a loser to both Cruz and Rubio, although not to Trump.  Bernie, on the other hand, beats any one of the three handily...according to CNN anyway.  I am ebullient.

My guess is that the contest between Sanders' near radical demand for change and Clinton's subdued request for it has been a plague to most Democrats.  Most of us aren't oblivious to practical realities, and we feel more now than ever that it is imperative that a Democrat be the next president.  If a Republican wins, his party will run rampant through all of the gains we have made in the name of progressive, compassionate governance and much, if not all, of the social awareness that such governance constitutes will be in jeopardy.  The repeal of the Affordable Care Act would likely be the first conservative purge to afflict us, but right behind us would be marital rights, religious deference at the expense of the civil rights of the rest of us, voting rights, balanced federal budgets at the expense of social programs, privatization of Social Security and Medicare, and the list goes on and on.  Much of the Great Society of LBJ has already been undermined, but it would all go in deference to some Calvinist brand of sanctimony, what I am not calling didactic positivism.  Ronald Reagan would be officially deified via an obsession with the "supply side," and getting wealthy, no matter at whose expense or at what environmental cost, would become the holy grail.  Forward to the future, I say, not back to it.

It is fascinating to me that conservatives extol the Reagan era by pointing out that millions of jobs were created during his administration, and they attribute those jobs to one thing: tax cuts.  But they fail to mention that even more jobs were created during the Clinton administration...by two million if my recollection is correct...and taxes on the well-to-do were increased during Clinton's eight years.  And we haven't had a scandal like the Iran-Contra affair and Ollie North since Reagan, though his ethical and philosophical scion, George W. Bush, did get us into a pair of wars under false pretenses and we're still paying the price.  Of course, where North was Reagan's minion, Bush was Cheney's, but the roll reversal doesn't exculpate the latter president.  While we have had Reagan epigones put themselves forward as leaders since Reagan, they have all been nothing better than mimics, but the risk with Trump and Cruz, even Rubio to a large extent, is that a new kind of political abuse of our democracy would come to the fore, and we would all suffer for it, possibly resulting in another thirty years of misguided policy.  Even Barrack Obama has been influenced by that supply-side nonsense, and by the notion that yielding on the progressive agenda by giving the Republicans what they want is compromise.   It isn't.  It's just yielding.

So, here comes Bernie Sanders with a new political paradigm.  Stand for what you believe is right for the great majority of the American people and you can win even though the rich have had all the power for more than three decades.  Instead of basing his philosophy on the supply-side, he is considering all sides, even the rich, because a more balanced economy will be a more productive one: fairer, more universally prosperous and thus, more stable in its progress toward a future in which everyone does well and no one has to suffer fear and indignity because he or she doesn't have enough money.  We will mind our own business under Bernie, though we will still be available to join in noble, international causes.  No more "American exceptionalism."  Just American nobility of mind and spirit.

So, while pessimism waxed in me until I read that poll, I am healed.  I can vote for Bernie Sanders without fear.  I hope everyone else can too.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The problem I have with Republicans is not just that they can support an ignorant, crass, Ozymandian blowhard like Donald Trump.  It is what I have taken to calling their didactic positivism.  They actually believe that not only are they more moral than the rest of us, but that it is as certain as science that they are right.  When you hear Trump speak, he really isn't saying much.  He's going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, but a president can't build a wall without money from congress, and two Mexican presidents have already said that their country will pay for Trump's wall when pigs fly.  He wants to repeal Obamacare, but his plan to replace it is just a group of other people's ideas, most of them anathema to the Republican House of Representatives. In the end, the elements of his plan have the effect of ensuring that those who can't afford healthcare now, plus many others--mostly those on the margins of Medicaid eligibility already--will still be unable to afford it.  He wants to give the states the power to set thresholds for Medicaid eligibility by funding the program with block grants to the states, but almost half the states have already demonstrated antipathy toward Medicaid and have refused to expand it as the Affordable Care Act permits.  Give them more power, and they will take it away from even more poor people.  The other elements of his plan--making medical fees more transparent and allowing insurers to sell their products across state lines, for example--are either beyond the pale as the law stands, even without Obamacare, or they have always been desirable but are also unachievable under extant law because of the free trade mentality that runs through American corporate law today.  Add the ingenuity of corporate greed and what's left of Trump's plan is a big package of nothing.  It's essentially back to the past, not back to the future.

And for the most part, that is because of the didactic positivism of the Republican Party.  Conservative principles, which more and more become the Republican platform, effectively posit the notion that if you can't support yourself, it's your own fault.  Never mind that college is unaffordable to you.  Forget about the fact that if your skin is a certain color, society still works against you in some insidious and very subtle ways.  And, how dare you not work because the only prospect you have is flipping burgers at some mega-corporation's retail outlets for minimum wage, which doesn't pay you much more than is necessary to pay for child care.  You shouldn't have had those children if you couldn't pay for them.  It's all such a neat package of sanctimony, and they seem endlessly able to contrive numerical rationalizations for their prejudices.  Thus, in the end, the Republican Party spawned Trump's candidacy, and the Tea Party dominated Republican Party stood there clapping all the while.  It seems to me that any rational person would one day wake up and realize that two plus two doesn't add up to five, much less to ten.  You can't take things from people in the way of material sustenance and expect of them that they will then do better as a consequence.  Even Bill Clinton didn't seem to understand that when he signed on to the Republican plan to diminish welfare by implementing a "reform."  People came to be limited to a certain number of years of welfare benefits over a lifetime infused with obstacles like unemployment due to recessions inspired by corporate greed.  Part of the safety net that LBJ called for in building the Great Society became anathema to those who were well off enough that they never had to worry about eating and sleeping under a roof...people who had putative virtue under the Calvinist Republican moral code, and there's the rub.  The Republicans have presumed to create a moral code, with all of its self-serving imperatives, and they never consider the possibility that anyone could reasonably disagree with them.

Abortion makes it all very clear.  The law is plain as to what the constitution allows states to do, but by going into other areas...essentially creating code violations that operate against most abortion clinics within a given state's jurisdiction...Republicans have found that they can sharply curtail access of women to the right recognized by our Supreme Court.  It is circumvention of the intent of the law in order to effectively reverse it, and they claim a righteous purpose in doing so, so they can kid themselves into thinking that they are acting in the American way.  I'm getting tired of it, and I hope that the Supreme Court will tire of it too, but who knows given the recalcitrance of the Republican controlled Senate.  In Texas, at least, women could be deprived of their rights again, just as they were before Roe v. Wade in 1973.  But there is a viable response to all this sanctimony.

What it comes down to is that moral positions are not based on numbers.  They are opinions, and letting the Republicans continue the debate by claiming that lower taxes  result in higher federal revenue, and that taking people off welfare makes them more able to support themselves, we liberals...or progressives if you prefer...have to stop playing their game with them.  It is time we began posing the social questions in terms of what we think is right, which is an opinion, and pointing out that what they are expressing as fact is just opinion too.  The election in November has to be about what kind of "Judeo-Christian" country we want to be.  Do we want to worship Mammon or God.  Do we care about people or things.  Is an accident of birth justification for either obscene wealth or obscene poverty.  Those are the questions we should be asking rather than letting the Republicans presume to give us all the answers.  I don't know about you, but I don't need their opinions; I have opinions of my own, and they ain't Republican

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The inability of the Republican field to combat the campaign tactics of the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, is both incomprehensible and daunting.  From that field--now a field of four, perhaps the most intelligent of the group, Ben Carson, having dropped out of the race--not a single candidate has even identified the tactic Trump uses for the voters of the party, and that is essential to undermining the devious mountebank's efforts.  Trump is a bully, and as such, he uses personal attack, and virtually nothing else, to domineer his adversaries rather than dominate the conversation about policy and philosophy.  He has mentioned immigration and thus taken the low road to the votes of the lowest common denominator in Republican politics, and he has claimed to be able to make "the greatest deals" that any of us have ever seen, though the fact that deal making is what got us into the mess started in 2007 and 2008 by a bunch of other people who thought that they were smarter than everyone else, doesn't seem to have dawned on his dubious constituency.  But overall, he simply snaps off a glib comment about the ears, or the lack of energy, or some other perceived shortcoming in anyone who questions him and the question is forgotten.  That tactic is called "ad hominem."  It focuses on the person rather than the issue, and by using it, Trump has managed to capture the hearts and minds of the plurality of the Republican electorate without taking a single comprehensive stab at solving any of our problems.  His appeal to the lowest common denominator in politics with his claim that he will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it is preposterous, but it never-the-less seems to persuade his contingent.  Yet, the way in which he has beaten down his opponents isn't with outlandish promises.  It is his ad hominem attacks that have put him in the "catbird seat."  If any of the candidates recognized that, Trump would already be a has been.

Consider, for example, Jeb Bush's confrontation of Marco Rubio over his failure to attend Senate sessions, preferring instead to campaign.  Rubio responded by claiming that the question was Bush being opportunistic and following the advice of one of his campaign advisors because he thought he could gain political advantage by asking about it.  Bush stumbled and repeated himself a couple of times as if by doing so he was somehow responding to Rubio, but he wasn't, and he abandoned that line of questioning because he couldn't seem to figure out how to make his point that the people of Florida were paying Rubio to cast Senate votes and be in Washington doing their business.  All Bush had to say was, forget who or why the question was asked, answer the question.  He could even have said, you're right, but it's still a good question; answer it.  But instead, he saw himself as having failed and he abandoned the question...a good one in light of the fact that the failure of Rubio and other candidates to get out of the race to make the defeat of Trump more likely--Trump being by consensus a menace to both the party and the nation--demonstrates that personal ambition and self-aggrandizement are their motivations, not service to a grateful nation.  Calling Trump out on using ad hominem tactics rather than answering questions, just like calling Rubio out on it would have, is what would disarm him, but instead, Trump's most viable opponents within the party have sunk to the same tactic.

Were I a candidate, I would give a speech, or perhaps even start every campaign speech, with a description of ad hominem rhetorical tactics and point out to the voters that attacking the source is not responding to criticism or answering questions.  Mtt Romney is scheduled to give a speech today in which he apparently will disavowed Trump and his candidacy, and Trump's response to word that the speech was forthcoming was to claim that Romney had "begged" Trump for his endorsement in 2012, and then to criticize Romney for being a "terrible candidate" rather than responding to Romney's anticipated assertions as to why Trump should not be the Republican nominee, and those assertions are widely known as Romney has been talking out of school.  If Romney, or anyone else in the party leadership is smart--a questionable proposition to start with--they will persistently reiterate Romney's criticisms pointing out that their source isn't the point...That the criticism is valid, whether it is or not; that the issue isn't whether Romney was a terrible candidate.  It's whether Trump is.

Confronting Trump's underhanded way of winning the argument wouldn't be an overnight success.  It would take concerted, persistent effort and repetition to succeed, but eventually, at least the responsible members of the party would have effectively warned his constituents that they were making a terrible mistake.  But unfortunately, Republicans are so dogmatic that they will probably continue to be constrained by conventional Republican thinking, which is in some respects an oxymoron in the first place.  So, suggesting that Republicans do the smart thing may be like telling your dog to take dictation.  It may just not be in the cards.

Your friend,

Mike