Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1020

Being Blunt: Modern-Day Butlers with Multiple Skills in Demand

From Batman’s Alfred Pennyworth to “Downton Abbey’s” Charles Carson, media’s portrayal of the manservant -- or butler as it is more commonly known -- has ranged from the absurd to the realistic. Now a new manservant is playing an important role in the Starz show “Blunt Talk,” starring Patrick Stewart as British expatriate Walter Blunt, a charismatic but self-destructive American news host. Blunt relies on his manservant, Harry, to help him navigate his messy personal and professional life. The term “manservant” may sound like a quant vestige of a long-ago age. The term butler – or occasionally house manager -- is more widely used and preferred because it sounds less demeaning, say domestic help firms. Regardless of the name, the demand for such jobs is strong enough to keep a number of schools busy training candidates. Among them are the Australian Butler School and The International Butler Academy in The Netherlands. They place students in positions worldwide. A three-year-old, San Francisco company, Manservants offers a whimsical take on the manservant or butler role. Centuries ago, the manservant was usually the head servant of a household who oversaw the wine cellar, pantry and dining room. Other manservants served as valets (personal attendants) and footmen, who ran errands and did chores. New World Duties Today thousands of butlers working at private homes, resorts and luxury hotels provide services that combine Old and New World flair. Salaries can range from $85,000 to $150,000, although some command more depending on the client’s needs including the number of homes they own. While butlers on television and in films are males, women are working in the field, as well. “There is still demand for the traditional butler who will pack and unpack clothes, greet guests and make sure the household is running smoothly,” said Robert Wynne Perry, founder and chief executive officer of Society Staffing, which includes Society Butler. “But today’s butler must also be tech-savvy and prepared to travel at a moment’s notice.” The boutique placement firm provides male and female butlers worldwide. “The function of the modern-day butler has evolved to encompass skills that help look after every aspect of a client’s busy personal and professional life,” Perry said. “Clients are looking for butlers who can quickly switch gears and deal with lots of situations all at once.” The modern butler, for example, is less likely to be polishing silver than to be overseeing an interior design project or assisting with the purchase of a new yacht.” Job duties have morphed over the years with some butlers now called estate managers or household managers and many serving as executive personal assistants, said Perry. Special Skills Multi-lingual and traveling butlers who can serve as concierges are in great demand. “The travelling butler is the ultimate support tool when on the road for business or pleasure,” said Perry. “They’re familiar with the culture and know how to get things done to make sure their employers have a smooth stay.” Clients are also looking for tech-savvy butlers who stay abreast of the latest software and security systems. “Butlers must have a strong knowledge of technology, whether they’re called upon to download pictures of the family or keep a smart home running seamlessly,” said Perry. Discretion is a paramount job requirement. “A lot of it is common sense,” said Perry, whose firm requires applicants to sign confidentiality agreements. Many families require staff to sign an additional confidentiality agreement, he said. For A Little Fantasy... For those intrigued by the word manservant, Manservants rents out gentlemen to treat women (and some men) “like a queen. The three-year-old company is as much about fantasy as service, although its website is clear that its manservants are not strippers. Manservants follow a “code of modern-day chivalry” that consists of 12 rules. They include responding with “As you wish,” addressing women with “My lady,” and “paying a compliment every quarter hour.” According to the Manservants’ website, manservants must also ensure the client “rides home safely, whether that is in a taxi, horse and carriage, or on piggyback.” Yet manservants may also perform more mundane tasks, including serving food and drinks at functions. Rates for a manservant start at $125 an hour up to $475 for a half-day (four hours). “Book one for a bachelorette party or any gathering to be your personal photographer, bartender, bodyguard, and butler all in one,” the company’s website says. The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth McFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZFrom Batman’s Alfred Pennyworth to “Downton Abbey’s” Charles Carson, media’s portrayal of the manservant -- or butler as it is more commonly known -- has ranged from the absurd to the realistic. Now a new manservant is playing an important role in the Starz show “Blunt Talk,” starring Patrick Stewart as British expatriate Walter Blunt, a charismatic but self-destructive American news host. Blunt relies on his manservant, Harry, to help him navigate his messy personal and professional life. The term “manservant” may sound like a quant vestige of a long-ago age. The term butler – or occasionally house manager -- is more widely used and preferred because it sounds less demeaning, say domestic help firms. Regardless of the name, the demand for such jobs is strong enough to keep a number of schools busy training candidates. Among them are the Australian Butler School and The International Butler Academy in The Netherlands. They place students in positions worldwide. A three-year-old, San Francisco company, Manservants offers a whimsical take on the manservant or butler role. Centuries ago, the manservant was usually the head servant of a household who oversaw the wine cellar, pantry and dining room. Other manservants served as valets (personal attendants) and footmen, who ran errands and did chores. New World Duties Today thousands of butlers working at private homes, resorts and luxury hotels provide services that combine Old and New World flair. Salaries can range from $85,000 to $150,000, although some command more depending on the client’s needs including the number of homes they own. While butlers on television and in films are males, women are working in the field, as well. “There is still demand for the traditional butler who will pack and unpack clothes, greet guests and make sure the household is running smoothly,” said Robert Wynne Perry, founder and chief executive officer of Society Staffing, which includes Society Butler. “But today’s butler must also be tech-savvy and prepared to travel at a moment’s notice.” The boutique placement firm provides male and female butlers worldwide. “The function of the modern-day butler has evolved to encompass skills that help look after every aspect of a client’s busy personal and professional life,” Perry said. “Clients are looking for butlers who can quickly switch gears and deal with lots of situations all at once.” The modern butler, for example, is less likely to be polishing silver than to be overseeing an interior design project or assisting with the purchase of a new yacht.” Job duties have morphed over the years with some butlers now called estate managers or household managers and many serving as executive personal assistants, said Perry. Special Skills Multi-lingual and traveling butlers who can serve as concierges are in great demand. “The travelling butler is the ultimate support tool when on the road for business or pleasure,” said Perry. “They’re familiar with the culture and know how to get things done to make sure their employers have a smooth stay.” Clients are also looking for tech-savvy butlers who stay abreast of the latest software and security systems. “Butlers must have a strong knowledge of technology, whether they’re called upon to download pictures of the family or keep a smart home running seamlessly,” said Perry. Discretion is a paramount job requirement. “A lot of it is common sense,” said Perry, whose firm requires applicants to sign confidentiality agreements. Many families require staff to sign an additional confidentiality agreement, he said. For A Little Fantasy... For those intrigued by the word manservant, Manservants rents out gentlemen to treat women (and some men) “like a queen. The three-year-old company is as much about fantasy as service, although its website is clear that its manservants are not strippers. Manservants follow a “code of modern-day chivalry” that consists of 12 rules. They include responding with “As you wish,” addressing women with “My lady,” and “paying a compliment every quarter hour.” According to the Manservants’ website, manservants must also ensure the client “rides home safely, whether that is in a taxi, horse and carriage, or on piggyback.” Yet manservants may also perform more mundane tasks, including serving food and drinks at functions. Rates for a manservant start at $125 an hour up to $475 for a half-day (four hours). “Book one for a bachelorette party or any gathering to be your personal photographer, bartender, bodyguard, and butler all in one,” the company’s website says. The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth McFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZFrom Batman’s Alfred Pennyworth to “Downton Abbey’s” Charles Carson, media’s portrayal of the manservant -- or butler as it is more commonly known -- has ranged from the absurd to the realistic. Now a new manservant is playing an important role in the Starz show “Blunt Talk,” starring Patrick Stewart as British expatriate Walter Blunt, a charismatic but self-destructive American news host. Blunt relies on his manservant, Harry, to help him navigate his messy personal and professional life. The term “manservant” may sound like a quant vestige of a long-ago age. The term butler – or occasionally house manager -- is more widely used and preferred because it sounds less demeaning, say domestic help firms. Regardless of the name, the demand for such jobs is strong enough to keep a number of schools busy training candidates. Among them are the Australian Butler School and The International Butler Academy in The Netherlands. They place students in positions worldwide. A three-year-old, San Francisco company, Manservants offers a whimsical take on the manservant or butler role. Centuries ago, the manservant was usually the head servant of a household who oversaw the wine cellar, pantry and dining room. Other manservants served as valets (personal attendants) and footmen, who ran errands and did chores. New World Duties Today thousands of butlers working at private homes, resorts and luxury hotels provide services that combine Old and New World flair. Salaries can range from $85,000 to $150,000, although some command more depending on the client’s needs including the number of homes they own. While butlers on television and in films are males, women are working in the field, as well. “There is still demand for the traditional butler who will pack and unpack clothes, greet guests and make sure the household is running smoothly,” said Robert Wynne Perry, founder and chief executive officer of Society Staffing, which includes Society Butler. “But today’s butler must also be tech-savvy and prepared to travel at a moment’s notice.” The boutique placement firm provides male and female butlers worldwide. “The function of the modern-day butler has evolved to encompass skills that help look after every aspect of a client’s busy personal and professional life,” Perry said. “Clients are looking for butlers who can quickly switch gears and deal with lots of situations all at once.” The modern butler, for example, is less likely to be polishing silver than to be overseeing an interior design project or assisting with the purchase of a new yacht.” Job duties have morphed over the years with some butlers now called estate managers or household managers and many serving as executive personal assistants, said Perry. Special Skills Multi-lingual and traveling butlers who can serve as concierges are in great demand. “The travelling butler is the ultimate support tool when on the road for business or pleasure,” said Perry. “They’re familiar with the culture and know how to get things done to make sure their employers have a smooth stay.” Clients are also looking for tech-savvy butlers who stay abreast of the latest software and security systems. “Butlers must have a strong knowledge of technology, whether they’re called upon to download pictures of the family or keep a smart home running seamlessly,” said Perry. Discretion is a paramount job requirement. “A lot of it is common sense,” said Perry, whose firm requires applicants to sign confidentiality agreements. Many families require staff to sign an additional confidentiality agreement, he said. For A Little Fantasy... For those intrigued by the word manservant, Manservants rents out gentlemen to treat women (and some men) “like a queen. The three-year-old company is as much about fantasy as service, although its website is clear that its manservants are not strippers. Manservants follow a “code of modern-day chivalry” that consists of 12 rules. They include responding with “As you wish,” addressing women with “My lady,” and “paying a compliment every quarter hour.” According to the Manservants’ website, manservants must also ensure the client “rides home safely, whether that is in a taxi, horse and carriage, or on piggyback.” Yet manservants may also perform more mundane tasks, including serving food and drinks at functions. Rates for a manservant start at $125 an hour up to $475 for a half-day (four hours). “Book one for a bachelorette party or any gathering to be your personal photographer, bartender, bodyguard, and butler all in one,” the company’s website says. The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth McFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZ

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Published on August 13, 2015 21:05

The “do-nothing bitch” binary: Why Kim Kardashian and Serena Williams both deserve selfie respect

“Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.” People who love quoting Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko usually begin with a statement to the effect of, “Yes, this is misogynistic, but we must put that aside to address its brilliance and accuracy.” One issue this quote highlights for sure is that not much has changed over time in terms of our general perception of women. Many of us (knowingly and otherwise) still embrace this idea that there are two types of women—the beautiful ones, who need not be faithful (which, in Yevtushenko’s quote is another word for “honest,” “conscientious” or “accurate,”) and those who, because of due diligence in other arenas, need not be (or cannot be) beautiful. The beautiful translation is pleasing to the eye and ear, but we respect the honorability of the faithful translation. Even those of us who call ourselves feminists are guilty of thinking similarly. There are women who we know are “beautiful” by traditional and/or modern standards and have made a career, we assume, built solely on their attractiveness. And there are women whom we respect because they have, according to us, earned their attention honorably, and so we might consider it blasphemous to utter the names Serena Williams and Kim Kardashian in the same sentence. But this week is different. This week, we should encourage ourselves to break that rule (and perhaps bend this very ancient beautiful/faithful binary) to talk about two powerful images that didn’t quite break the Internet, but probably should have. The photos for Serena Williams’ New York magazine fashion issue cover story inspired women everywhere to change their Facebook cover photos and or hit the gym—and hit it hard. Not unlike Henry Leutwyler’s jaw-dropping photos of ballerina Misty Copeland, the shot of Williams on the bar is a perfect amalgamation of the athletic, the erotic and the out-of-this-world. Depending on your gaze, it screams “Black Power” and “Woman Power,” as much as it declares, “Screw every single last one of you who thought that you could label my body as either sexy or masculine, beautiful to look at or faithful to my athletic career.” According to New York magazine—and anyone with any knowledge of Williams’ stellar career—she is “cementing her reputation as the greatest women’s player of all time ... making her a serious contender for the greatest athlete of her generation.” In other words, and to quote MMA champion Ronda Rousey, Williams is not a “do-nothing bitch” (DNB, for short). If we weren’t living in a time and place reeking from the foul odor of misogyny in every arena, including that of the sports world, her body would have no reason to be under critique or attack. The question of Williams’ “beauty” (read: usefulness to the [white] male, heterosexual gaze) would never come up. Many of us have made this argument before—that it is cultural sickness that demands athletes like Williams and Rousey also meet standards of beauty and femininity. It’s a sickness that demands that they win matches, but also look attractive while doing so, and use nice, ladylike language if they do not win. Many of us fight against such a sickness in conversations about Williams, because she’s not a DNB; whether she wanted to or not, she became proof of a hardworking woman with fire in her bones. It’s easy to champion images like those in Williams’ cover story, and to speak out in their defense. Not so for Kim Kardashian. Recently, Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams argued that, even if one is politically at odds with a certain type of woman, as a feminist you must stand with them at times. Although I’m not entirely in agreement with the framing of this argument (especially where it concerns Megyn Kelly), I would agree that one can be opposed to a woman (Kim Kardashian, for example) and all that she may or may not represent, and still recognize your own will to create binary oppositions. Consider Rousey’s definition of a DNB:

“The kind of chick that just tries to be pretty and be taken care of by someone else. That’s why I think it’s hilarious if my body looks masculine or something like that. Listen, just because my body was developed for a purpose other than fucking millionaires doesn’t mean it’s masculine. I think it’s femininely badass as fuck because there’s not a single muscle on my body that isn’t for a purpose, because I’m not a do nothing bitch.”

Even though we know Kim Kardashian is not a kept woman, it’s true that Kardashians’s body's traits are very much aligned with the heterosexual male gaze — and many probably think of her as "the kind of chick that just tries to be pretty." And few of us are willing to jump in and defend critiques or attacks aimed at her body, because we think we know the history of this body, and how its owner has put it to use over the years. But what happens when that body becomes a shared space, as is the case when Kim Kardashian becomes pregnant? Is that body still up for critique? According to a recent Instagram post, Kardashian doesn’t think so, and I’m inclined to agree with her. The average headline promoting Kardashian's nude self-portrait read, “Kim Kardashian Shares Naked Pregnant Selfie!” And we find that appropriate because we know (or think we know) that this was exactly the point—for Kardashian to create one more click-worthy image for her brand. But in a different world, a headline might have read, “Kim Kardashian Pulls a Catherine Breillat, Shares Provocative Image That Asks Us to Reconsider Sex and Gender Politics.” (Okay, it’s a stretch, but not by too far.) In her caption, and in an attempt to challenge rumors of a surrogate pregnancy, Kardashian perfectly explains the conundrum in trying to make sense of a pregnant body:

“First they say I'm too skinny so I have to be faking it... Now they say I'm too big so I have to be faking it... SMH! Some days I'm photographed before I eat & look smaller, some days I've just eaten & I look bigger. It's all a part of the process. Everyone's body is different, every pregnancy is very different!... They also say your body carries a boy different than a girl!”

Anyone who has ever been pregnant or ever born witness to a person with child knows this is true. The pregnant body, especially after the first trimester, is a strange beast of many varying shapes, which resists critique and defies all concepts of what is normal, beautiful, feminine or masculine. It is miraculous, creepy, lovely and horrifying, often all at the same time. But more to the point—and this is a question that was asked by a few sane people during Kardashian’s first pregnancy—why are we critiquing a pregnant person and/or her body? The quick reply is often, “Because it’s Kim Kardashian, and she asks for it; she’s made a career off of all manner of attention, so she deserves it.” Are we not expected to critique her body, when she’s posting a nude pregnant selfie on Instagram? Is she not asking us to do just that? But just because the photo was shared, does that make the body “ours”? And how is that way of thinking very different from suggesting that, because a tennis player wears a fashionable outfit on the court, or because she poses spread eagle for a magazine, this person’s body exists in part for our gaze and our critique? The difficult truth is that we see women—athletes, politicians, actresses, women transitioning from manhood, First Ladies, teenage girls and younger—as all versions of Kim Kardashian. That is to say, by mere fact of being a woman or becoming a woman, all women are asking for critique, inviting the [male, usually white, heterosexual] gaze upon their bodies. We have seen this time and again, with ridiculous headlines highlighting a respected woman’s choice of outfit, or a respected musician or actresses’s choice of lover. Respectability is an issue here, too, for those of us calling out such obvious misogyny. What happens when the woman is considered to be less respectable — say, a reality TV star instead of a world-class athlete? Will we defend a pregnant Kardashian as we defend Serena Williams? Yevtushenko might label one “beautiful” and the other “faithful,” and Rousey might consider one of them a DNB and the other a DSB, but often enough they are both subjected to the same problematic gaze. In 1886, Nietzsche published a sweet little piece of writing titled “Beyond Good and Evil,” in which he accused the great thinkers of his time (and all times before him) of being dogmatic (he also began that book with a critique of the general misunderstanding of women, where women signified “philosophy”). Even those of us who studied Nietzche, or Derrida, or other post-structuralists often still speak and think in terms of good and bad, right and wrong. We still exist in a political climate based on the left and the right, and we still place women in the category of “beautiful" or “faithful,” (as in smart, accurate or useful in some way other than for the arousal of heterosexual men). And we defend those women according to the value we place on each camp. But this week, both Serena Williams and Kim Kardashian defended themselves with striking images that made essentially the same statement: “This body, though visible to you, is not [always, or maybe ever] here for you.” In the name of gender equality, we should embrace it.

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Published on August 13, 2015 16:00

Ted Cruz’s grotesque demagoguery: Planned Parenthood prosecutions, polio and American “values”

Two weeks ago, Sen. Ted Cruz convened a subcommittee hearing on alleged abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service. Conservatives and Republicans have been up in arms over claims that the IRS singled out nonprofit Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny when considering their applications for tax exempt status. At the hearing, Cruz tore into the IRS and the Obama administration, drew comparisons to Richard Nixon’s felonious behavior, and declared with solemn gravity that “no politician has the right to use the machinery of the executive branch to target political enemies.” Just a couple of days ago, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz released an ad promising that he, as president, would use the machinery of the executive branch to target a political enemy. “Ted Cruz will prosecute and defund Planned Parenthood,” the ad declares, for the unforgivable crime of donating tissues from aborted fetuses to be used for medical research. That practice isn’t actually illegal, but a series of undercover sting videos released by an antiabortion rights activist group have created the impression that Planned Parenthood is profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. Overheated allegations aside, there is no indication that Planned Parenthood is actually doing that, but Ted Cruz is going to prosecute them anyway and end the practice of “harvest[ing] organs from unborn children.” The ad and the promises it makes are noteworthy for several reasons. As Steve Benen points out, Cruz is sort of giving up the game when it comes to these Planned Parenthood videos. He presents the use of fetal tissues for medical research as crime that must be stopped, but his solution – prosecuting and defunding Planned Parenthood – won’t change the fact that the practice is explicitly permitted by law. He’s just railing against Planned Parenthood and trying to ride the wave of conservative outrage the sting videos generated. There also seems to be a huge problem with the imagery Cruz’s ad people chose for this advertisement. Its opening shots appear to be black-and-white videos of young polio patients in wheelchairs and leg braces. “For a century, Americans have helped heal and care for millions in need,” the narrator says. Polio ceased being a scourge in this country after American scientists used human fetal tissues to develop the first polio vaccine in the 1950s. The researchers involved won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1954. The eradication of polio is one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, and one of the worst possible examples to include in an ad attacking fetal tissue donation for medical research. And that’s to say nothing of the myriad other vaccines – rubella, hepatitis A, rabies, chicken pox – that have been developed or produced using fetal cells. Cruz’s campaign against fetal tissue research also would seem to conflict with one of his under-the-radar policy goals: pushing medical researchers to devise cures for deadly and debilitating diseases. In mid-July, Cruz held a Senate hearing with a panel of medical experts to discuss ways to better use government resources when it comes to researching cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and a bevy of other incurable diseases. “We pay billions or trillions on the back end, dealing with the consequences of horrific diseases rather than investing and creating the incentives on the front end to cure these diseases once and for all,” Cruz said at that hearing. Removing fetal tissue research from scientists’ toolbox would deal a huge setback to the development of cures for those diseases. Stem cell-based treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease show great promise, and fetal tissue research is being used to develop treatments for Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injuries. No one is denying that there is a grim price attached to these advancements, and the moral complexities at play are difficult to negotiate – this Vox essay by a former biotech employee who worked with fetal tissues to develop breast cancer treatments is an excellent examination of the moral tug of war at the heart of this type of research. Cruz isn’t having that discussion, though. He’s demagoguing the issue, posturing as a tough guy, and presenting the donation of fetal tissue as inarguably contrary to America’s “values.” In doing so he's ignoring the incredible advancements in medical science that fetal tissue research has made possible and may make possible in the future.

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Published on August 13, 2015 03:00

Donald Trump’s biggest crime is his honesty: How he exposes the sickening rot at the core of the GOP

Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap dodge. To laugh at the assembly of 10 right-wing presidential aspirants for two hours of questioning is to flinch from a truth too heavy to bear even as we must. The Fox News spectacle counts as entertainment only as tragedy does. Given the position these people seek, the decisions the next president will make, how seriously our media and many voters take them, and the money lining up to advance one or another of them into office, we have just been advised of how very perilous the American predicament is at this moment. Bad as the candidates’ domestic agendas are, the danger is greater, far greater, on the foreign policy side, and this is our topic. Somebody smart recently defined tragedy as the difference between what is and what could have been. This is the thought: We have a brief time left to correct our course before the American experiment begins to self-destruct beyond retrieval, and we have not yet proven strong or brave or honest enough to make the move. To me, this is what makes last Thursday’s spectacle tragic rather than comic. I have thought since the Tea Party’s appearance on the political scene half a dozen years ago that the American right was destined to destroy itself before our eyes. Last week’s G.O.P. display—it was politics as spectacle, not a debate—convinces me of this. The Republican Party as it has been in history is already gone, more or less, and is being replaced—more swiftly than one would have thought possible—with what amounts to a fanatical fringe. Good enough that the Republicans tip into unreason, you might think. But who could have guessed that irrationality was a winning political platform? Who would have imagined even a few years ago that the Rockefeller wing of the party was so spineless and desperate to win Washington that it would capitulate to extremists thoroughly incompetent to address the 21st century’s self-evident realities? The question to come is whether the American electorate will commission those who have usurped the G.O.P. to destroy a lot more than the party. Put any one of these people in office and Americans will forfeit their chance to participate constructively in a self-evidently emergent world order, to escape a past that now haunts us, to act abroad out of something other than fear. We have to start with Donald Trump to understand what we are getting from the right flank of our right-wing nation. It may seem unlikely, but Trump and the reaction to him among his G.O.P. opponents took me right back to my years as a correspondent in Tokyo: Every so often a cabinet minister in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party would make some egregiously unsound remark about the righteousness of Japan’s Pacific war, objectionable Westerners or the inferiority of the Chinese. The next day he would be sanctimoniously removed from office and forced to provide a ritualized apology that meant nothing. What was the offending minister’s sin? It lay not in his thinking or convictions, one came quickly to recognize, but in articulating publicly the views of all orthodox Liberal Democrats. This is Trump among his fellow Republicans. Post-Cleveland, I think of him as the id of the G.O.P. The other 16 candidates detest him more than any Democrat does, I would wager, because there is no air whatsoever between the Donald’s views—assuming they remain stable long enough to make them out—and those of anyone else vying for office in the reconstituted G.O.P. All that marks out Trump from other Republican aspirants is his presentation, the too-blunt-to-bear crudity of his prejudices against too many things and people to count, his hollowed-out presumptions of American primacy, his impossible promise to lunge backward to “make America great again.” In a word, Trump comes up with the wrong affect. And there is no understanding the spectacle American politics has become, or why this nation conducts itself so recklessly abroad, unless we grasp the importance of affect in the American consciousness and American public life. Trump is correct in his estimation of what a right-wing American pol has to be to get anywhere: dismissive of the Other, intolerant of all alternative perspectives, suspicious of thought, given to action (preferably violent) while indifferent to its consequences. Trump’s ultimate sin—a paradox here—is to possess an affect so plainly the sum total of what he has to offer that it exposes the rest of the Republican crowd: They are all empty but for slightly varied poses. All they have for us is affect.

* * *

Since the days of Jefferson, Americans have cast themselves as “a people of feeling,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Andrew Burstein. Ours was a “culture of sensibility.” Americans, in other words, tended to rely on feeling, as opposed to thought, to understand a given question or fix a given problem. This New World trope was part of what made Americans American. Yes, America was the flower of the Enlightenment and authority derived from law. But reason was not the source of true conviction in American culture. Emotional experience was, as the Great Awakening of the 1730s made starkly plain. One felt, one was converted, then one believed. The sentimental aspect of the American character assigned great importance to affect. Bearing, demeanor, attitude, posture—these things took on a certain patriotic dimension. A good American had to be observably American. To be “affectionate,” indeed, was part of what it meant to be American in the early years. But the peaceable, generous, good-willed Americans of the 18th century gave way in the 1820s to the Jacksonian kind of American: Aggressive, uncompromising, masculine in the traditional manner, suspicious of intellect and sympathy, given to swift action and simple justice. You can see where this leads easily enough. Think of all the Hollywood films and television programs you have wasted your time watching. Think of John Wayne, Joe Friday, Hoss Cartwright and everything Clint Eastwood has ever done. Think of "Duck Dynasty." To a very weird extent, our culture consists of a never-ending lesson in the proper American affect. Now as in the 18th century, it is affect that distinguishes us and proves us patriotic. Same thing in our national political life. Al Gore was a lousy candidate because his demeanor was wooden—“hard to like the guy.” Bill Clinton can say “I feel your pain” and thus we find faith in his policies. Bush II reports of Putin, “I saw into his soul,” and it is honored as serious comment. Sarah Palin attacks Obama for speaking well, which means he is not “a real patriot.” And here we are in 2015. Scott Walker says of the most significant diplomatic accord to be negotiated in decades, “We don’t need more information… we need decisive leadership and we need it now…. The United States needs a foreign policy that puts steel in the face of our enemies.” It says nothing and everything, doesn’t it? Nobody in Cleveland last week said anything of substance, either. Jeb Bush gave one of his foreign policy speeches Tuesday, and again, while he said nothing, the presentation told the whole story. The right wing in American politics is still quoting the 18th century: What matters most is the affect of the man or woman who holds our highest office. As may be plain, I assign the 2016 presidential contest a large psychological dimension. The policy positions will count, of course, and I will get to them, but what is most fundamentally at issue is the character of the American consciousness. To strip the point to the simplest terms, we are in an argument between affect and thought, or between feeling and reason. We need to have it, but right-thinking people must recognize that we do not have much time to get it done. To substitute affect for thought, as all G.O.P. candidates propose, is dangerous for two reasons. First and very practically, it almost inevitably produces bad results. Bush II’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-September 11 period are obvious but not isolated cases. The need was to look tough, to act without thinking, to declare “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck. Second, affect is a dangerous appeal to the subconscious in us. It addresses unsayable fears, resentments and insecurities, and fortifies idealized selves, self-images derived from impossible Hollywood plots and characters. In this respect it is the doorway to irrational politics and behavior, especially in our conduct abroad. To complete the thought, while affect may be mistaken for charisma, the two are very different. The latter is a many-sided attribute in a man or woman. Charisma draws its power from thought, insight, imagination, wisdom; it leads people to new understandings, ways of seeing they never knew were possible. Affect is by comparison one-dimensional. It reduces politics to spectacle, so it is ersatz, WalMart charisma at best. Reagan, who dragged America back into the politics of affect after the defeat in Vietnam, was the master—and hence the idol of all 10 men on the stage in Cleveland. Bobby Kennedy (the later Bobby) or Mandela were by contrast charismatic figures. Two exceptional pieces on the Republicans have come out since Cleveland. Both shed good light on what the Republicans propose to offer voters as they try to win back the White House. Last Friday Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, published an opinion item headlined, “They Can’t Be Serious.” “While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals,” Krugman writes. “Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party…. Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious—not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.” There is something in this not to be missed. In effect, the Republicans’ gamble is that the denial of the realities with which we live will prove attractive to enough voters to put a G.O.P. candidate in the White House. Two big things are at stake here. One, the Republicans may turn out to be right. Two, denial is essential to the right wing’s position. They are committed to refusing any acknowledgement of the requirements the 21st century imposes upon us. Denial is totemic, then—a kind of ritual of refusal. It reflects, and I would say unmistakably, a deep, subconscious fear abroad among us. Many voters want to see and hear denials. They depend on the irrationality of each one. This is what I mean by a self-destructing party—and the danger all of us will face if we get a Republican victory next year. We will be made prisoners of our past in all its real and imagined aspects. It is not possible, of course, to live well in such a space. A few days ago the Atlantic published Peter Beinart’s “The Surge Fallacy,” an essay on the return to Bush II foreign policy postures. We have had next to nothing other than bluster from Republican aspirants so far, but again, these people say nothing but tell us everything. Beinart describes a kind of subterranean drift in the right-wing orthodoxy—yet another attempt to lunge backward into permanent avoidance. “Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down,” Beinart begins. “As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed ‘neoconservative’ seemed on the verge of collapse…. That was then. Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the G.O.P. presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal…” Beinart identifies a new rewrite of the Iraq narrative—wherein Bush won the war with his 2007 “surge,” and the Obama administration punted it by withdrawing American forces—as the signal moment in this latest iteration of American militarism. The “surge fallacy,” as Beinart calls it, was Jeb Bush’s theme, made ad hominem with an attack on Hillary Clinton, when he spoke Tuesday at—where else?—the Reagan Library in Southern California. What are we to say when the Republican candidate who trades on an image of moderation—this is his affect, of course—turns out to be as ungiven to reason as the worst in the lineup? The follow-on problem here is that, however well or badly the Republican candidate does in the election, he or she can force any Democrat, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, to cast America’s foreign policy alternatives in proximately unreal terms. The American right’s new hawkishness, thus, is not a sickness from which the rest of us can claim immunity. There is none for Americans. In a remarkable appearance at the Reuters newsroom in New York Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry put the point as forcefully as he has ever said anything: “Our allies are going to look at us and laugh,” he warned, if this country’s rightists kill the accord with Iran. Then this: “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge antipathy [to U.S. leadership] out there. There’s a big bloc out there, folks, that isn’t just sitting around waiting for the United States to tell them what to do.” Last week’s message from Cleveland is simple and stark, it seems to me. The politics of affect must be understood for what it is and then decisively countered if we are to advance into that place known as the 21st century. This means we have to stop pretending to take posing politicians, those who dress up fear as courage, as credible voices in the conversation Americans need to have. Let the media write about them as if they are serious. They are serious only as measures of how much needs to get swept away. These judgments may seem Cassandra-like, but so be it. It seems to me Cleveland also told us that the political season to come could prove a last, best hope for who knows how long to alter the course to destruction we remain on.Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap dodge. To laugh at the assembly of 10 right-wing presidential aspirants for two hours of questioning is to flinch from a truth too heavy to bear even as we must. The Fox News spectacle counts as entertainment only as tragedy does. Given the position these people seek, the decisions the next president will make, how seriously our media and many voters take them, and the money lining up to advance one or another of them into office, we have just been advised of how very perilous the American predicament is at this moment. Bad as the candidates’ domestic agendas are, the danger is greater, far greater, on the foreign policy side, and this is our topic. Somebody smart recently defined tragedy as the difference between what is and what could have been. This is the thought: We have a brief time left to correct our course before the American experiment begins to self-destruct beyond retrieval, and we have not yet proven strong or brave or honest enough to make the move. To me, this is what makes last Thursday’s spectacle tragic rather than comic. I have thought since the Tea Party’s appearance on the political scene half a dozen years ago that the American right was destined to destroy itself before our eyes. Last week’s G.O.P. display—it was politics as spectacle, not a debate—convinces me of this. The Republican Party as it has been in history is already gone, more or less, and is being replaced—more swiftly than one would have thought possible—with what amounts to a fanatical fringe. Good enough that the Republicans tip into unreason, you might think. But who could have guessed that irrationality was a winning political platform? Who would have imagined even a few years ago that the Rockefeller wing of the party was so spineless and desperate to win Washington that it would capitulate to extremists thoroughly incompetent to address the 21st century’s self-evident realities? The question to come is whether the American electorate will commission those who have usurped the G.O.P. to destroy a lot more than the party. Put any one of these people in office and Americans will forfeit their chance to participate constructively in a self-evidently emergent world order, to escape a past that now haunts us, to act abroad out of something other than fear. We have to start with Donald Trump to understand what we are getting from the right flank of our right-wing nation. It may seem unlikely, but Trump and the reaction to him among his G.O.P. opponents took me right back to my years as a correspondent in Tokyo: Every so often a cabinet minister in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party would make some egregiously unsound remark about the righteousness of Japan’s Pacific war, objectionable Westerners or the inferiority of the Chinese. The next day he would be sanctimoniously removed from office and forced to provide a ritualized apology that meant nothing. What was the offending minister’s sin? It lay not in his thinking or convictions, one came quickly to recognize, but in articulating publicly the views of all orthodox Liberal Democrats. This is Trump among his fellow Republicans. Post-Cleveland, I think of him as the id of the G.O.P. The other 16 candidates detest him more than any Democrat does, I would wager, because there is no air whatsoever between the Donald’s views—assuming they remain stable long enough to make them out—and those of anyone else vying for office in the reconstituted G.O.P. All that marks out Trump from other Republican aspirants is his presentation, the too-blunt-to-bear crudity of his prejudices against too many things and people to count, his hollowed-out presumptions of American primacy, his impossible promise to lunge backward to “make America great again.” In a word, Trump comes up with the wrong affect. And there is no understanding the spectacle American politics has become, or why this nation conducts itself so recklessly abroad, unless we grasp the importance of affect in the American consciousness and American public life. Trump is correct in his estimation of what a right-wing American pol has to be to get anywhere: dismissive of the Other, intolerant of all alternative perspectives, suspicious of thought, given to action (preferably violent) while indifferent to its consequences. Trump’s ultimate sin—a paradox here—is to possess an affect so plainly the sum total of what he has to offer that it exposes the rest of the Republican crowd: They are all empty but for slightly varied poses. All they have for us is affect.

* * *

Since the days of Jefferson, Americans have cast themselves as “a people of feeling,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Andrew Burstein. Ours was a “culture of sensibility.” Americans, in other words, tended to rely on feeling, as opposed to thought, to understand a given question or fix a given problem. This New World trope was part of what made Americans American. Yes, America was the flower of the Enlightenment and authority derived from law. But reason was not the source of true conviction in American culture. Emotional experience was, as the Great Awakening of the 1730s made starkly plain. One felt, one was converted, then one believed. The sentimental aspect of the American character assigned great importance to affect. Bearing, demeanor, attitude, posture—these things took on a certain patriotic dimension. A good American had to be observably American. To be “affectionate,” indeed, was part of what it meant to be American in the early years. But the peaceable, generous, good-willed Americans of the 18th century gave way in the 1820s to the Jacksonian kind of American: Aggressive, uncompromising, masculine in the traditional manner, suspicious of intellect and sympathy, given to swift action and simple justice. You can see where this leads easily enough. Think of all the Hollywood films and television programs you have wasted your time watching. Think of John Wayne, Joe Friday, Hoss Cartwright and everything Clint Eastwood has ever done. Think of "Duck Dynasty." To a very weird extent, our culture consists of a never-ending lesson in the proper American affect. Now as in the 18th century, it is affect that distinguishes us and proves us patriotic. Same thing in our national political life. Al Gore was a lousy candidate because his demeanor was wooden—“hard to like the guy.” Bill Clinton can say “I feel your pain” and thus we find faith in his policies. Bush II reports of Putin, “I saw into his soul,” and it is honored as serious comment. Sarah Palin attacks Obama for speaking well, which means he is not “a real patriot.” And here we are in 2015. Scott Walker says of the most significant diplomatic accord to be negotiated in decades, “We don’t need more information… we need decisive leadership and we need it now…. The United States needs a foreign policy that puts steel in the face of our enemies.” It says nothing and everything, doesn’t it? Nobody in Cleveland last week said anything of substance, either. Jeb Bush gave one of his foreign policy speeches Tuesday, and again, while he said nothing, the presentation told the whole story. The right wing in American politics is still quoting the 18th century: What matters most is the affect of the man or woman who holds our highest office. As may be plain, I assign the 2016 presidential contest a large psychological dimension. The policy positions will count, of course, and I will get to them, but what is most fundamentally at issue is the character of the American consciousness. To strip the point to the simplest terms, we are in an argument between affect and thought, or between feeling and reason. We need to have it, but right-thinking people must recognize that we do not have much time to get it done. To substitute affect for thought, as all G.O.P. candidates propose, is dangerous for two reasons. First and very practically, it almost inevitably produces bad results. Bush II’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-September 11 period are obvious but not isolated cases. The need was to look tough, to act without thinking, to declare “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck. Second, affect is a dangerous appeal to the subconscious in us. It addresses unsayable fears, resentments and insecurities, and fortifies idealized selves, self-images derived from impossible Hollywood plots and characters. In this respect it is the doorway to irrational politics and behavior, especially in our conduct abroad. To complete the thought, while affect may be mistaken for charisma, the two are very different. The latter is a many-sided attribute in a man or woman. Charisma draws its power from thought, insight, imagination, wisdom; it leads people to new understandings, ways of seeing they never knew were possible. Affect is by comparison one-dimensional. It reduces politics to spectacle, so it is ersatz, WalMart charisma at best. Reagan, who dragged America back into the politics of affect after the defeat in Vietnam, was the master—and hence the idol of all 10 men on the stage in Cleveland. Bobby Kennedy (the later Bobby) or Mandela were by contrast charismatic figures. Two exceptional pieces on the Republicans have come out since Cleveland. Both shed good light on what the Republicans propose to offer voters as they try to win back the White House. Last Friday Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, published an opinion item headlined, “They Can’t Be Serious.” “While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals,” Krugman writes. “Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party…. Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious—not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.” There is something in this not to be missed. In effect, the Republicans’ gamble is that the denial of the realities with which we live will prove attractive to enough voters to put a G.O.P. candidate in the White House. Two big things are at stake here. One, the Republicans may turn out to be right. Two, denial is essential to the right wing’s position. They are committed to refusing any acknowledgement of the requirements the 21st century imposes upon us. Denial is totemic, then—a kind of ritual of refusal. It reflects, and I would say unmistakably, a deep, subconscious fear abroad among us. Many voters want to see and hear denials. They depend on the irrationality of each one. This is what I mean by a self-destructing party—and the danger all of us will face if we get a Republican victory next year. We will be made prisoners of our past in all its real and imagined aspects. It is not possible, of course, to live well in such a space. A few days ago the Atlantic published Peter Beinart’s “The Surge Fallacy,” an essay on the return to Bush II foreign policy postures. We have had next to nothing other than bluster from Republican aspirants so far, but again, these people say nothing but tell us everything. Beinart describes a kind of subterranean drift in the right-wing orthodoxy—yet another attempt to lunge backward into permanent avoidance. “Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down,” Beinart begins. “As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed ‘neoconservative’ seemed on the verge of collapse…. That was then. Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the G.O.P. presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal…” Beinart identifies a new rewrite of the Iraq narrative—wherein Bush won the war with his 2007 “surge,” and the Obama administration punted it by withdrawing American forces—as the signal moment in this latest iteration of American militarism. The “surge fallacy,” as Beinart calls it, was Jeb Bush’s theme, made ad hominem with an attack on Hillary Clinton, when he spoke Tuesday at—where else?—the Reagan Library in Southern California. What are we to say when the Republican candidate who trades on an image of moderation—this is his affect, of course—turns out to be as ungiven to reason as the worst in the lineup? The follow-on problem here is that, however well or badly the Republican candidate does in the election, he or she can force any Democrat, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, to cast America’s foreign policy alternatives in proximately unreal terms. The American right’s new hawkishness, thus, is not a sickness from which the rest of us can claim immunity. There is none for Americans. In a remarkable appearance at the Reuters newsroom in New York Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry put the point as forcefully as he has ever said anything: “Our allies are going to look at us and laugh,” he warned, if this country’s rightists kill the accord with Iran. Then this: “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge antipathy [to U.S. leadership] out there. There’s a big bloc out there, folks, that isn’t just sitting around waiting for the United States to tell them what to do.” Last week’s message from Cleveland is simple and stark, it seems to me. The politics of affect must be understood for what it is and then decisively countered if we are to advance into that place known as the 21st century. This means we have to stop pretending to take posing politicians, those who dress up fear as courage, as credible voices in the conversation Americans need to have. Let the media write about them as if they are serious. They are serious only as measures of how much needs to get swept away. These judgments may seem Cassandra-like, but so be it. It seems to me Cleveland also told us that the political season to come could prove a last, best hope for who knows how long to alter the course to destruction we remain on.Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap dodge. To laugh at the assembly of 10 right-wing presidential aspirants for two hours of questioning is to flinch from a truth too heavy to bear even as we must. The Fox News spectacle counts as entertainment only as tragedy does. Given the position these people seek, the decisions the next president will make, how seriously our media and many voters take them, and the money lining up to advance one or another of them into office, we have just been advised of how very perilous the American predicament is at this moment. Bad as the candidates’ domestic agendas are, the danger is greater, far greater, on the foreign policy side, and this is our topic. Somebody smart recently defined tragedy as the difference between what is and what could have been. This is the thought: We have a brief time left to correct our course before the American experiment begins to self-destruct beyond retrieval, and we have not yet proven strong or brave or honest enough to make the move. To me, this is what makes last Thursday’s spectacle tragic rather than comic. I have thought since the Tea Party’s appearance on the political scene half a dozen years ago that the American right was destined to destroy itself before our eyes. Last week’s G.O.P. display—it was politics as spectacle, not a debate—convinces me of this. The Republican Party as it has been in history is already gone, more or less, and is being replaced—more swiftly than one would have thought possible—with what amounts to a fanatical fringe. Good enough that the Republicans tip into unreason, you might think. But who could have guessed that irrationality was a winning political platform? Who would have imagined even a few years ago that the Rockefeller wing of the party was so spineless and desperate to win Washington that it would capitulate to extremists thoroughly incompetent to address the 21st century’s self-evident realities? The question to come is whether the American electorate will commission those who have usurped the G.O.P. to destroy a lot more than the party. Put any one of these people in office and Americans will forfeit their chance to participate constructively in a self-evidently emergent world order, to escape a past that now haunts us, to act abroad out of something other than fear. We have to start with Donald Trump to understand what we are getting from the right flank of our right-wing nation. It may seem unlikely, but Trump and the reaction to him among his G.O.P. opponents took me right back to my years as a correspondent in Tokyo: Every so often a cabinet minister in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party would make some egregiously unsound remark about the righteousness of Japan’s Pacific war, objectionable Westerners or the inferiority of the Chinese. The next day he would be sanctimoniously removed from office and forced to provide a ritualized apology that meant nothing. What was the offending minister’s sin? It lay not in his thinking or convictions, one came quickly to recognize, but in articulating publicly the views of all orthodox Liberal Democrats. This is Trump among his fellow Republicans. Post-Cleveland, I think of him as the id of the G.O.P. The other 16 candidates detest him more than any Democrat does, I would wager, because there is no air whatsoever between the Donald’s views—assuming they remain stable long enough to make them out—and those of anyone else vying for office in the reconstituted G.O.P. All that marks out Trump from other Republican aspirants is his presentation, the too-blunt-to-bear crudity of his prejudices against too many things and people to count, his hollowed-out presumptions of American primacy, his impossible promise to lunge backward to “make America great again.” In a word, Trump comes up with the wrong affect. And there is no understanding the spectacle American politics has become, or why this nation conducts itself so recklessly abroad, unless we grasp the importance of affect in the American consciousness and American public life. Trump is correct in his estimation of what a right-wing American pol has to be to get anywhere: dismissive of the Other, intolerant of all alternative perspectives, suspicious of thought, given to action (preferably violent) while indifferent to its consequences. Trump’s ultimate sin—a paradox here—is to possess an affect so plainly the sum total of what he has to offer that it exposes the rest of the Republican crowd: They are all empty but for slightly varied poses. All they have for us is affect.

* * *

Since the days of Jefferson, Americans have cast themselves as “a people of feeling,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Andrew Burstein. Ours was a “culture of sensibility.” Americans, in other words, tended to rely on feeling, as opposed to thought, to understand a given question or fix a given problem. This New World trope was part of what made Americans American. Yes, America was the flower of the Enlightenment and authority derived from law. But reason was not the source of true conviction in American culture. Emotional experience was, as the Great Awakening of the 1730s made starkly plain. One felt, one was converted, then one believed. The sentimental aspect of the American character assigned great importance to affect. Bearing, demeanor, attitude, posture—these things took on a certain patriotic dimension. A good American had to be observably American. To be “affectionate,” indeed, was part of what it meant to be American in the early years. But the peaceable, generous, good-willed Americans of the 18th century gave way in the 1820s to the Jacksonian kind of American: Aggressive, uncompromising, masculine in the traditional manner, suspicious of intellect and sympathy, given to swift action and simple justice. You can see where this leads easily enough. Think of all the Hollywood films and television programs you have wasted your time watching. Think of John Wayne, Joe Friday, Hoss Cartwright and everything Clint Eastwood has ever done. Think of "Duck Dynasty." To a very weird extent, our culture consists of a never-ending lesson in the proper American affect. Now as in the 18th century, it is affect that distinguishes us and proves us patriotic. Same thing in our national political life. Al Gore was a lousy candidate because his demeanor was wooden—“hard to like the guy.” Bill Clinton can say “I feel your pain” and thus we find faith in his policies. Bush II reports of Putin, “I saw into his soul,” and it is honored as serious comment. Sarah Palin attacks Obama for speaking well, which means he is not “a real patriot.” And here we are in 2015. Scott Walker says of the most significant diplomatic accord to be negotiated in decades, “We don’t need more information… we need decisive leadership and we need it now…. The United States needs a foreign policy that puts steel in the face of our enemies.” It says nothing and everything, doesn’t it? Nobody in Cleveland last week said anything of substance, either. Jeb Bush gave one of his foreign policy speeches Tuesday, and again, while he said nothing, the presentation told the whole story. The right wing in American politics is still quoting the 18th century: What matters most is the affect of the man or woman who holds our highest office. As may be plain, I assign the 2016 presidential contest a large psychological dimension. The policy positions will count, of course, and I will get to them, but what is most fundamentally at issue is the character of the American consciousness. To strip the point to the simplest terms, we are in an argument between affect and thought, or between feeling and reason. We need to have it, but right-thinking people must recognize that we do not have much time to get it done. To substitute affect for thought, as all G.O.P. candidates propose, is dangerous for two reasons. First and very practically, it almost inevitably produces bad results. Bush II’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-September 11 period are obvious but not isolated cases. The need was to look tough, to act without thinking, to declare “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck. Second, affect is a dangerous appeal to the subconscious in us. It addresses unsayable fears, resentments and insecurities, and fortifies idealized selves, self-images derived from impossible Hollywood plots and characters. In this respect it is the doorway to irrational politics and behavior, especially in our conduct abroad. To complete the thought, while affect may be mistaken for charisma, the two are very different. The latter is a many-sided attribute in a man or woman. Charisma draws its power from thought, insight, imagination, wisdom; it leads people to new understandings, ways of seeing they never knew were possible. Affect is by comparison one-dimensional. It reduces politics to spectacle, so it is ersatz, WalMart charisma at best. Reagan, who dragged America back into the politics of affect after the defeat in Vietnam, was the master—and hence the idol of all 10 men on the stage in Cleveland. Bobby Kennedy (the later Bobby) or Mandela were by contrast charismatic figures. Two exceptional pieces on the Republicans have come out since Cleveland. Both shed good light on what the Republicans propose to offer voters as they try to win back the White House. Last Friday Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, published an opinion item headlined, “They Can’t Be Serious.” “While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals,” Krugman writes. “Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party…. Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious—not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.” There is something in this not to be missed. In effect, the Republicans’ gamble is that the denial of the realities with which we live will prove attractive to enough voters to put a G.O.P. candidate in the White House. Two big things are at stake here. One, the Republicans may turn out to be right. Two, denial is essential to the right wing’s position. They are committed to refusing any acknowledgement of the requirements the 21st century imposes upon us. Denial is totemic, then—a kind of ritual of refusal. It reflects, and I would say unmistakably, a deep, subconscious fear abroad among us. Many voters want to see and hear denials. They depend on the irrationality of each one. This is what I mean by a self-destructing party—and the danger all of us will face if we get a Republican victory next year. We will be made prisoners of our past in all its real and imagined aspects. It is not possible, of course, to live well in such a space. A few days ago the Atlantic published Peter Beinart’s “The Surge Fallacy,” an essay on the return to Bush II foreign policy postures. We have had next to nothing other than bluster from Republican aspirants so far, but again, these people say nothing but tell us everything. Beinart describes a kind of subterranean drift in the right-wing orthodoxy—yet another attempt to lunge backward into permanent avoidance. “Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down,” Beinart begins. “As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed ‘neoconservative’ seemed on the verge of collapse…. That was then. Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the G.O.P. presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal…” Beinart identifies a new rewrite of the Iraq narrative—wherein Bush won the war with his 2007 “surge,” and the Obama administration punted it by withdrawing American forces—as the signal moment in this latest iteration of American militarism. The “surge fallacy,” as Beinart calls it, was Jeb Bush’s theme, made ad hominem with an attack on Hillary Clinton, when he spoke Tuesday at—where else?—the Reagan Library in Southern California. What are we to say when the Republican candidate who trades on an image of moderation—this is his affect, of course—turns out to be as ungiven to reason as the worst in the lineup? The follow-on problem here is that, however well or badly the Republican candidate does in the election, he or she can force any Democrat, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, to cast America’s foreign policy alternatives in proximately unreal terms. The American right’s new hawkishness, thus, is not a sickness from which the rest of us can claim immunity. There is none for Americans. In a remarkable appearance at the Reuters newsroom in New York Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry put the point as forcefully as he has ever said anything: “Our allies are going to look at us and laugh,” he warned, if this country’s rightists kill the accord with Iran. Then this: “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge antipathy [to U.S. leadership] out there. There’s a big bloc out there, folks, that isn’t just sitting around waiting for the United States to tell them what to do.” Last week’s message from Cleveland is simple and stark, it seems to me. The politics of affect must be understood for what it is and then decisively countered if we are to advance into that place known as the 21st century. This means we have to stop pretending to take posing politicians, those who dress up fear as courage, as credible voices in the conversation Americans need to have. Let the media write about them as if they are serious. They are serious only as measures of how much needs to get swept away. These judgments may seem Cassandra-like, but so be it. It seems to me Cleveland also told us that the political season to come could prove a last, best hope for who knows how long to alter the course to destruction we remain on.

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Published on August 13, 2015 02:59

Trump the indestructible: Not even his bizarre Planned Parenthood defense will do him in

So Donald Trump is going around saying nice things about Planned Parenthood. It's hard to think of anything theoretically more damaging right now for a Republican presidential primary contender than to say anything remotely positive about Planned Parenthood. It's one of those moves that we'd call an instant death knell for any other GOP presidential aspirant. But because it's Donald Trump, he'll probably shoot up in the polls, for no apparent reason, since that's just how things work for him. What is Trump saying about Planned Parenthood? Well, he certainly doesn't like abortion -- hates abortion! He doesn't care for the abortion-y stuff that Planned Parenthood does: very bad. Some other stuff they do, though: good. Seriously, though, this is not far off from what Trump said:

“The problem that I have with Planned Parenthood is the abortion situation. It is like an abortion factory, frankly,” Trump said. “And you can’t have it. And you just shouldn’t be funding it. That should not be funded by the government, and I feel strongly about that.” When pressed on non-abortion services Planned Parenthood allegedly provides, Trump said, “What I would do when the time came, I’d look at the individual things they do, and maybe some of the individual things they do are good. I know a lot of the things are bad. But certainly the abortion aspect of it should not be funded by government, absolutely.” Trump continued, “I would look at the good aspects of [Planned Parenthood], and I would also look, because I’m sure they do some things properly and good and that are good for women, and I would look at that, and I would look at other aspects also. But we have to take care of women.”

Trump is saying that we have to weigh the pros and cons of Planned Parenthood in determining whether it should receive Title X funding from the federal government. The "abortion aspect" of it should not be funded, while perhaps its other family planning and women's health care services should. In other words, Trump defended the status quo with regards to the federal government's Planned Parenthood funding. Federal law prohibits funding of abortion services; the Title X money that Planned Parenthood receives goes to its non-abortion operations. Conservatives don't buy this explanation, though, and consider all of Planned Parenthood's money fungible: Any dollar going to Planned Parenthood is a dollar that supports abortion. Among the many conservative media figures who lashed out at Trump after these comments on Tuesday morning was Breitbart News' John Nolte. "Any money given to Planned Parenthood funds abortion," Nolte wrote, "Period." Hmm... Breitbart News. Does that ring a bell? Ah yes, this is the conservative news outlet that flatters the hell out of Donald Trump. We wondered a couple of weeks ago what could possibly motivate that outlet to run interference for Trump so flagrantly. Our best guess was access, but it turns out it may be cold hard cash. Like, Trump giving money to Breitbart News. That... would be the simplest theory. But Nolte's attempt to push back at those pay-for-play rumors by posting a condemnation of Trump's Planned Parenthood comments were canceled out from in-house, when trusty Trump sycophant Matt Boyle rose to Trump's defense in a very beautiful, very classy piece. "In response to several folks seemingly misunderstanding what the 2016 GOP frontrunner said on CNN on Tuesday morning about Planned Parenthood funding," Boyle wrote, "Donald Trump has issued a statement to Breitbart News exclusively that makes it crystal clear where he stands: While the organization conducts abortions, they should receive no taxpayer dollars." The EXCLUSIVE statement:

While Planned Parenthood is engaging in the despicable practice of abortion — in addition to then selling aborted baby body parts to the highest bidder — the organization should receive no taxpayer dollars. The liberal left wing always claims that Planned Parenthood isn’t about abortion and that it’s about other general areas of women’s health. I am totally in favor of women’s health and if they can put their money where their mouth is, and stop the abortion services at Planned Parenthood entirely, we can talk about government funding for many of the other aspects of the organization that do a lot of good.

"What’s perhaps the most interesting development here is, now that Trump has set the record straight—and made clear that he supports no tax money going to the organization while it’s in the abortion business—he seems to have exposed the entire political class yet again," Boyle's hilarious article continues. "All his haters crawled out of the woodwork to attack him to argue he suggested he’d be okay with funding Planned Parenthood at all while the organization is still in the abortion business, and he just exposed them all yet again." Later on Tuesday night, though, Trump appeared on "Hannity" -- his preferred Fox News vehicle -- and yet again seemed not "crystal clear" about where he stands on Planned Parenthood funding. He said "maybe" he would support eliminating all funding for Planned Parenthood until it ceased performing abortions, while reiterating all of the nice things he'd previously said about the organization. Here we quote a third Breitbart News article (love you guys!):

Trump was then asked if they should get any taxpayer money, he answered, “let’s say there’s two Planned Parenthoods, in a way. You have it as an abortion clinic. Now, that’s actually a fairly small part of what they do, but it’s a brutal part, and I’m totally against it, and I wouldn’t do that. They also, however, service woman, and one of the things that I thought was so terrible, when Jeb Bush…when he talked about women’s health issues, he was so bad. I mean, it’s like, what is he doing? We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. So, we have to look at the positives, also, for Planned Parenthood. You know, even a guy like you, you may be convinced that it does some positive things. I would look at it very strongly. We have to help women. As far as the abortion stuff, absolutely un –.” He was then asked, “But if they are doing abortions, then they can allocate their other resources to other things. … why should the taxpayers pay for an organization that — ?” Trump answered, “Maybe unless they stop with the abortions, we don’t do the funding for the stuff that we want. There are many ways you can do that, Sean, because I’m totally against the abortion aspect of Planned Parenthood, but I’ve had many women, I’ve had many Republican, conservative women come up and say Planned Parenthood serves a good function, other than that one aspect.”

What's interesting here is not just the joy of watching the internal psychodrama of Breitbart News play out in article-length subtweets against each other. It shows how Trump manages to survive or even take advantage of each gaffe, whether it's saying that John McCain sucks at war for getting captured, or that Megyn Kelly was probably on her period during the debate, or now saying that Planned Parenthood is great. A bigger wave of conservative pundits come after him each time, but then he successfully converts those pundits into enemies of the cause and accomplices in the PC Police's takeover of our discourse. The more villains he creates publicly, the stronger he ends up. For now.So Donald Trump is going around saying nice things about Planned Parenthood. It's hard to think of anything theoretically more damaging right now for a Republican presidential primary contender than to say anything remotely positive about Planned Parenthood. It's one of those moves that we'd call an instant death knell for any other GOP presidential aspirant. But because it's Donald Trump, he'll probably shoot up in the polls, for no apparent reason, since that's just how things work for him. What is Trump saying about Planned Parenthood? Well, he certainly doesn't like abortion -- hates abortion! He doesn't care for the abortion-y stuff that Planned Parenthood does: very bad. Some other stuff they do, though: good. Seriously, though, this is not far off from what Trump said:

“The problem that I have with Planned Parenthood is the abortion situation. It is like an abortion factory, frankly,” Trump said. “And you can’t have it. And you just shouldn’t be funding it. That should not be funded by the government, and I feel strongly about that.” When pressed on non-abortion services Planned Parenthood allegedly provides, Trump said, “What I would do when the time came, I’d look at the individual things they do, and maybe some of the individual things they do are good. I know a lot of the things are bad. But certainly the abortion aspect of it should not be funded by government, absolutely.” Trump continued, “I would look at the good aspects of [Planned Parenthood], and I would also look, because I’m sure they do some things properly and good and that are good for women, and I would look at that, and I would look at other aspects also. But we have to take care of women.”

Trump is saying that we have to weigh the pros and cons of Planned Parenthood in determining whether it should receive Title X funding from the federal government. The "abortion aspect" of it should not be funded, while perhaps its other family planning and women's health care services should. In other words, Trump defended the status quo with regards to the federal government's Planned Parenthood funding. Federal law prohibits funding of abortion services; the Title X money that Planned Parenthood receives goes to its non-abortion operations. Conservatives don't buy this explanation, though, and consider all of Planned Parenthood's money fungible: Any dollar going to Planned Parenthood is a dollar that supports abortion. Among the many conservative media figures who lashed out at Trump after these comments on Tuesday morning was Breitbart News' John Nolte. "Any money given to Planned Parenthood funds abortion," Nolte wrote, "Period." Hmm... Breitbart News. Does that ring a bell? Ah yes, this is the conservative news outlet that flatters the hell out of Donald Trump. We wondered a couple of weeks ago what could possibly motivate that outlet to run interference for Trump so flagrantly. Our best guess was access, but it turns out it may be cold hard cash. Like, Trump giving money to Breitbart News. That... would be the simplest theory. But Nolte's attempt to push back at those pay-for-play rumors by posting a condemnation of Trump's Planned Parenthood comments were canceled out from in-house, when trusty Trump sycophant Matt Boyle rose to Trump's defense in a very beautiful, very classy piece. "In response to several folks seemingly misunderstanding what the 2016 GOP frontrunner said on CNN on Tuesday morning about Planned Parenthood funding," Boyle wrote, "Donald Trump has issued a statement to Breitbart News exclusively that makes it crystal clear where he stands: While the organization conducts abortions, they should receive no taxpayer dollars." The EXCLUSIVE statement:

While Planned Parenthood is engaging in the despicable practice of abortion — in addition to then selling aborted baby body parts to the highest bidder — the organization should receive no taxpayer dollars. The liberal left wing always claims that Planned Parenthood isn’t about abortion and that it’s about other general areas of women’s health. I am totally in favor of women’s health and if they can put their money where their mouth is, and stop the abortion services at Planned Parenthood entirely, we can talk about government funding for many of the other aspects of the organization that do a lot of good.

"What’s perhaps the most interesting development here is, now that Trump has set the record straight—and made clear that he supports no tax money going to the organization while it’s in the abortion business—he seems to have exposed the entire political class yet again," Boyle's hilarious article continues. "All his haters crawled out of the woodwork to attack him to argue he suggested he’d be okay with funding Planned Parenthood at all while the organization is still in the abortion business, and he just exposed them all yet again." Later on Tuesday night, though, Trump appeared on "Hannity" -- his preferred Fox News vehicle -- and yet again seemed not "crystal clear" about where he stands on Planned Parenthood funding. He said "maybe" he would support eliminating all funding for Planned Parenthood until it ceased performing abortions, while reiterating all of the nice things he'd previously said about the organization. Here we quote a third Breitbart News article (love you guys!):

Trump was then asked if they should get any taxpayer money, he answered, “let’s say there’s two Planned Parenthoods, in a way. You have it as an abortion clinic. Now, that’s actually a fairly small part of what they do, but it’s a brutal part, and I’m totally against it, and I wouldn’t do that. They also, however, service woman, and one of the things that I thought was so terrible, when Jeb Bush…when he talked about women’s health issues, he was so bad. I mean, it’s like, what is he doing? We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. So, we have to look at the positives, also, for Planned Parenthood. You know, even a guy like you, you may be convinced that it does some positive things. I would look at it very strongly. We have to help women. As far as the abortion stuff, absolutely un –.” He was then asked, “But if they are doing abortions, then they can allocate their other resources to other things. … why should the taxpayers pay for an organization that — ?” Trump answered, “Maybe unless they stop with the abortions, we don’t do the funding for the stuff that we want. There are many ways you can do that, Sean, because I’m totally against the abortion aspect of Planned Parenthood, but I’ve had many women, I’ve had many Republican, conservative women come up and say Planned Parenthood serves a good function, other than that one aspect.”

What's interesting here is not just the joy of watching the internal psychodrama of Breitbart News play out in article-length subtweets against each other. It shows how Trump manages to survive or even take advantage of each gaffe, whether it's saying that John McCain sucks at war for getting captured, or that Megyn Kelly was probably on her period during the debate, or now saying that Planned Parenthood is great. A bigger wave of conservative pundits come after him each time, but then he successfully converts those pundits into enemies of the cause and accomplices in the PC Police's takeover of our discourse. The more villains he creates publicly, the stronger he ends up. For now.

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Published on August 13, 2015 02:58

The glaring logical flaw at the heart of Rand Paul’s economic plan

As some of you may have heard, Sen. Rand Paul provided us with some of his famous libertarian insight the other day. When asked about whether his flat tax plan, which would make all incomes over $50,000 taxable by an equal 14.5 percent, would increase income inequality, which is already at record highs, he responded:

“The thing is, income inequality is due to some people working harder and selling more things. If people voluntarily buy more of your stuff, you'll have more money....It's a fallacious notion to say, 'Oh, rich people get more money back in a tax cut,’ if you cut taxes 10 percent, 10 percent of a million is more than 10 percent of a thousand dollars. So, obviously, people who pay more in taxes will get more back.”

At a time when the top 1 percent's share of income has just about tripled over the past four decades, and is now at similar heights as just before the Great Depression in 1928, it is interesting to hear a presidential candidate shrug it off as if it were a minor issue. Paul's notion that income inequality is because of “some people working harder” is wonderfully dumb, and it causes me to wonder what Sen. Paul imagines hard work to be. Is a CEO or a politician's job harder than, say, a coal miner or fisherman's -- which, by the way, are considered by many to be the “hardest” jobs in America. Paul seems to assume that everyone is “selling things” rather than selling (renting) their labor to capitalists or the state. This is a very libertarian way of thinking -- looking at every working person as a small businessperson selling whatever good they produce with the sweat of their brow. This is what I have previously called lemonade-stand capitalism. Before economies became industrialized during the 18th and 19th centuries, this model of labor was true for a certain class of working individuals, called artisans. These workers were somewhat like small businessmen, crafting various goods or providing services that required a certain degree of skill in towns and cities. As capitalism and industrialization grew, the need for artisans decreased, as goods that had previously been crafted by artisans began to be mass produced much more efficiently through the division of labor. But enough history; today, the majority of people in America do not sell anything other than their labor value -- whether they work for a multinational corporation, a small business or the state. There are about 28 million small businesses in America -- ranging from self-employed therapists to businesses with hundreds of employees. In the case of small businesses, what Paul said makes logical sense -- owners who sell more goods (or services) have more money. However, like it or not, the majority of Americans are not small business owners. There are nearly 320 million citizens in the United States, and most of them sell their labor to the business owners who employ them. For these individuals, whether they are coal miners or computer scientists, they produce a certain amount of value, and receive a fraction of this value in income. Now, when looking at actual workers who sell their labor to capitalists, it is clear that working harder or being more productive has done little to make them wealthier. Since the 1980s, these workers have been paid less and less for their labor. As productivity increased with technology, capitalists have managed to get even more out of the workers' labor. Moreover, our income-tax system was completely overhauled with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut many loopholes, but also slashed the top marginal rate from 70 percent in 1981 to 28 percent in 1988. Since then, executives have become increasingly well paid, while everyone else has seen their pay stagnate. No doubt, there are many reasons for the rise in income inequality, but creating a less progressive tax system is a big one. It seems quite obvious that when the top tax rate is slashed, top earners become much wealthier -- especially because they can demand outrageously high wages without worrying about it being taxed at a higher rate. Imagine you are a CEO discussing your pay package with the board, for example. If you know that your income will be taxed at a higher rate the more you earn, there is less incentive to demand outrageous sums. If you know that you will be taxed at the same rate of 14 percent regardless of what you make, you will reach for the sky. There is no doubt that income inequality will only increase with Rand’s radical plan. When income inequality has reached record highs, it is not wise to move toward a plan that will only increase this inequality. Paul’s beliefs are based largely on the false notion that every single person sells something, and that if they work harder, they will make more. This is a childish and utopian view of the economy. The truth is that Paul does not care about income inequality, and neither do any of the other GOP candidates. This idea that some people are lazy and others are hard workers is sacred in Republican circles. As with many other issues, the “just-world bias” kicks in whenever inequalities or injustices are discussed, and explained away with this notion that people get what they deserve. By now Paul should understand how false this notion is. He is, after all, competing with Donald Trump.As some of you may have heard, Sen. Rand Paul provided us with some of his famous libertarian insight the other day. When asked about whether his flat tax plan, which would make all incomes over $50,000 taxable by an equal 14.5 percent, would increase income inequality, which is already at record highs, he responded:

“The thing is, income inequality is due to some people working harder and selling more things. If people voluntarily buy more of your stuff, you'll have more money....It's a fallacious notion to say, 'Oh, rich people get more money back in a tax cut,’ if you cut taxes 10 percent, 10 percent of a million is more than 10 percent of a thousand dollars. So, obviously, people who pay more in taxes will get more back.”

At a time when the top 1 percent's share of income has just about tripled over the past four decades, and is now at similar heights as just before the Great Depression in 1928, it is interesting to hear a presidential candidate shrug it off as if it were a minor issue. Paul's notion that income inequality is because of “some people working harder” is wonderfully dumb, and it causes me to wonder what Sen. Paul imagines hard work to be. Is a CEO or a politician's job harder than, say, a coal miner or fisherman's -- which, by the way, are considered by many to be the “hardest” jobs in America. Paul seems to assume that everyone is “selling things” rather than selling (renting) their labor to capitalists or the state. This is a very libertarian way of thinking -- looking at every working person as a small businessperson selling whatever good they produce with the sweat of their brow. This is what I have previously called lemonade-stand capitalism. Before economies became industrialized during the 18th and 19th centuries, this model of labor was true for a certain class of working individuals, called artisans. These workers were somewhat like small businessmen, crafting various goods or providing services that required a certain degree of skill in towns and cities. As capitalism and industrialization grew, the need for artisans decreased, as goods that had previously been crafted by artisans began to be mass produced much more efficiently through the division of labor. But enough history; today, the majority of people in America do not sell anything other than their labor value -- whether they work for a multinational corporation, a small business or the state. There are about 28 million small businesses in America -- ranging from self-employed therapists to businesses with hundreds of employees. In the case of small businesses, what Paul said makes logical sense -- owners who sell more goods (or services) have more money. However, like it or not, the majority of Americans are not small business owners. There are nearly 320 million citizens in the United States, and most of them sell their labor to the business owners who employ them. For these individuals, whether they are coal miners or computer scientists, they produce a certain amount of value, and receive a fraction of this value in income. Now, when looking at actual workers who sell their labor to capitalists, it is clear that working harder or being more productive has done little to make them wealthier. Since the 1980s, these workers have been paid less and less for their labor. As productivity increased with technology, capitalists have managed to get even more out of the workers' labor. Moreover, our income-tax system was completely overhauled with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut many loopholes, but also slashed the top marginal rate from 70 percent in 1981 to 28 percent in 1988. Since then, executives have become increasingly well paid, while everyone else has seen their pay stagnate. No doubt, there are many reasons for the rise in income inequality, but creating a less progressive tax system is a big one. It seems quite obvious that when the top tax rate is slashed, top earners become much wealthier -- especially because they can demand outrageously high wages without worrying about it being taxed at a higher rate. Imagine you are a CEO discussing your pay package with the board, for example. If you know that your income will be taxed at a higher rate the more you earn, there is less incentive to demand outrageous sums. If you know that you will be taxed at the same rate of 14 percent regardless of what you make, you will reach for the sky. There is no doubt that income inequality will only increase with Rand’s radical plan. When income inequality has reached record highs, it is not wise to move toward a plan that will only increase this inequality. Paul’s beliefs are based largely on the false notion that every single person sells something, and that if they work harder, they will make more. This is a childish and utopian view of the economy. The truth is that Paul does not care about income inequality, and neither do any of the other GOP candidates. This idea that some people are lazy and others are hard workers is sacred in Republican circles. As with many other issues, the “just-world bias” kicks in whenever inequalities or injustices are discussed, and explained away with this notion that people get what they deserve. By now Paul should understand how false this notion is. He is, after all, competing with Donald Trump.