Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 815

April 4, 2016

Richard Nixon would be “drummed out” of GOP today as a liberal: “He passed as much social welfare legislation as Lyndon Johnson”

In February 1974, two months before he resigned from office amid the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon proposed Obamacare. He didn’t call it that — he called it the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan — but the broad outlines of his proposal look awfully familiar. The plan included a mandate that employers provide coverage to all full-time employees. It would have created a federal program called Assisted Health Insurance to provide coverage to everyone not covered by Medicare, Medicaid or an employer plan. And it would have included a panel of physicians that would control medical costs by “reducing needless hospitalization.” The leading Republicans on the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees supported Nixon’s 1974 plan, which the New York Times said was “vastly more liberal than the one he introduced in 1971” that would have provided less comprehensive indigent care. Congress failed to act on the 1974 proposal — not because of Watergate but because the House Ways and Means Committee could not settle on one of three competing versions of the plan. Nixon did, however, sign a long list of other progressive legislation, including the laws that created the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He expanded the reach of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He put two justices on the Supreme Court who would later vote with the majority on Roe v. Wade. Evan Thomas, a former reporter and editor at Newsweek, has written books about Bobby Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt. His latest, the biography "Being Nixon: A Man Divided," is just out in paperback. Thomas sat down with Salon to talk about Nixon in the 1960s and whether he would recognize the Republican Party of 2016. (Short answer: No.) How factional was the Republican primary in 1960? The primaries barely existed in 1960, and Nixon was essentially the designated heir that year. Back then a candidate only entered the primary in a handful of states, right? That’s right. Kennedy only entered the primaries in five or six states. Until 1968, the bosses ran the show. After 1968 blew up in Chicago, the parties gave up some of that control. What was the demographic profile of Republican voters in 1960? In 1960, there were Main Street Republicans like Bob Dole. There were Northeast moderate to liberal Republicans who were conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social issues like John Lindsay and Bill Scranton. And that was basically it. The John Birch Society types were still Democrats at that time. The far right was such a small group. It mushroomed by 1964 with Barry Goldwater, but it was much smaller in 1960. Nixon hated the Birchers; they were way too far to the right for him. The election in 1960 was very close, so Richard Nixon winning that year would not necessarily have represented a conservative mandate. No. Nixon was a populist and played to people’s fears, and he could sound conservative when he tried to appeal to southern Democrats. But he was more often moderate in the tradition of Northeast moderates and believed the government had some responsibilities. If you look at his first term as president after the 1968 election, he signed a lot of legislation. Part of that was Democrats on Capitol Hill, but he believed that government had to govern. He passed as much social welfare legislation as Lyndon Johnson. He would get drummed out of the party today as a liberal. So would Ronald Reagan. And so would Reagan. The Republican Party have gone far to the right. Between the 1960 election and the 1964 election, you have the Kennedy assassination, the March on Washington, and the police actions in Birmingham. Did those things provoke conservatives toward Barry Goldwater? The anger on the right was always puzzling to East Coast establishment people like my parents. Where is the anger coming from? I think it came from where populism always comes from. When parts of the country feel disaffected and left behind and feel like the liberal elites are in charge, it makes many people angry. There was a feeling of gradual government creep from the New Deal through World War II, through the Eisenhower years, and through Kennedy. When the cities and the campuses started blowing up, conservatives really got angry. That was in the mid and late 1960s. Right. When Nixon ran for president in 1968 and again in 1972, he talked about permissiveness and the idea that churches were crumbling and the military was crumbling. Everything was getting lax and loose and permissive. Nixon tapped into that fear and rode it into power, but he didn’t govern that way. He was more interested in confounding his enemies, and sometime that meant doing it to the left. Was Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 more about retrenchment or more about ideology? I think 1964 was more about ideology and 1968 was more about fear. People had gotten very anxious over cities burning and campus protests and the Vietnam War. Does think the “take back our country” language that Donald Trump and his supporters use is a response to something particular? It’s a lot of things, but a lot of it is about Trump cashing in on being against political correctness — that idea that you have to be super sensitive about minorities while poor white males are getting the shaft from the system and from Wall Street. People think that comes from liberal elites. He appeals to lower-middle-class whites who feel like they’re getting screwed. Also, the coarsening of our culture has made Trump’s bullying acceptable. It’s OK to brag and boast and bully. People like that. You used to see more value placed on modesty and humility. Trump violates those norms, and he’s rewarded for it. Why do people want a presidential candidate to be like that? I think people are growing up in a culture where that’s normal. It’s the way things are, and you can get ahead by pushing people around. Did populist sentiment factor into the elections from 1960 to 1972? A little bit. Populism has been there for a long time, but it’s never gotten to 51 percent. What’s amazing about this election cycle is that there’s a chance that raw, nativist populism could get to 51 percent. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suggest that the sentiment is stronger, maybe, than any other time in our history. I wonder if part of the difference between this year and the last two elections is that there were consensus moderates and diffuse far-right candidates in 2008 and 2012, and this year it’s the opposite. Romney certainly benefitted from the far-right candidates beating each other up. Do you see Nixon and Reagan as pragmatist presidents? Oh, definitely. They were people who could deal with the other side. Reagan worked with Tip O’Neill on tax reform. Nixon made all sorts of deals on Capitol Hill. People who support Donald Trump and Ted Cruz really seem to want a president who will not make a deal with anybody. We’ve seen that from the rejectionists in the House for the last few years. It was enough to bring down a Speaker. They can’t compromise because it means giving President Obama something he wants — even if it’s what they want. I’ve covered Congress for many years. In the 1980s, congressmen socialized with each other. Now, they all live in their districts and commute to Washington. They used to drink and whore together — there was [the Quorum Club] at the Carroll Arms Hotel that was run by Bobby Baker, one of LBJ’s aides. The Carroll Arms Hotel was used by Democrats and Republicans. Sen. George Smathers was a Democrat, and he would lead the bipartisan drinking and whoring. Sen. Chris Dodd once told me that the worst thing that happened to Congress was when they started getting unlimited flights back to their districts. It used to just be a few trips a year. Nobody lives in Washington today. And money is a bigger factor now. The worst part of that is the time they have to spend raising the money. They’re over at their party headquarters dialing for dollars every day. I don’t think it’s the expenditures as much as the sheer amount of time that makes congressmen more dependent on interest groups.In February 1974, two months before he resigned from office amid the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon proposed Obamacare. He didn’t call it that — he called it the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan — but the broad outlines of his proposal look awfully familiar. The plan included a mandate that employers provide coverage to all full-time employees. It would have created a federal program called Assisted Health Insurance to provide coverage to everyone not covered by Medicare, Medicaid or an employer plan. And it would have included a panel of physicians that would control medical costs by “reducing needless hospitalization.” The leading Republicans on the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees supported Nixon’s 1974 plan, which the New York Times said was “vastly more liberal than the one he introduced in 1971” that would have provided less comprehensive indigent care. Congress failed to act on the 1974 proposal — not because of Watergate but because the House Ways and Means Committee could not settle on one of three competing versions of the plan. Nixon did, however, sign a long list of other progressive legislation, including the laws that created the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He expanded the reach of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He put two justices on the Supreme Court who would later vote with the majority on Roe v. Wade. Evan Thomas, a former reporter and editor at Newsweek, has written books about Bobby Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt. His latest, the biography "Being Nixon: A Man Divided," is just out in paperback. Thomas sat down with Salon to talk about Nixon in the 1960s and whether he would recognize the Republican Party of 2016. (Short answer: No.) How factional was the Republican primary in 1960? The primaries barely existed in 1960, and Nixon was essentially the designated heir that year. Back then a candidate only entered the primary in a handful of states, right? That’s right. Kennedy only entered the primaries in five or six states. Until 1968, the bosses ran the show. After 1968 blew up in Chicago, the parties gave up some of that control. What was the demographic profile of Republican voters in 1960? In 1960, there were Main Street Republicans like Bob Dole. There were Northeast moderate to liberal Republicans who were conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social issues like John Lindsay and Bill Scranton. And that was basically it. The John Birch Society types were still Democrats at that time. The far right was such a small group. It mushroomed by 1964 with Barry Goldwater, but it was much smaller in 1960. Nixon hated the Birchers; they were way too far to the right for him. The election in 1960 was very close, so Richard Nixon winning that year would not necessarily have represented a conservative mandate. No. Nixon was a populist and played to people’s fears, and he could sound conservative when he tried to appeal to southern Democrats. But he was more often moderate in the tradition of Northeast moderates and believed the government had some responsibilities. If you look at his first term as president after the 1968 election, he signed a lot of legislation. Part of that was Democrats on Capitol Hill, but he believed that government had to govern. He passed as much social welfare legislation as Lyndon Johnson. He would get drummed out of the party today as a liberal. So would Ronald Reagan. And so would Reagan. The Republican Party have gone far to the right. Between the 1960 election and the 1964 election, you have the Kennedy assassination, the March on Washington, and the police actions in Birmingham. Did those things provoke conservatives toward Barry Goldwater? The anger on the right was always puzzling to East Coast establishment people like my parents. Where is the anger coming from? I think it came from where populism always comes from. When parts of the country feel disaffected and left behind and feel like the liberal elites are in charge, it makes many people angry. There was a feeling of gradual government creep from the New Deal through World War II, through the Eisenhower years, and through Kennedy. When the cities and the campuses started blowing up, conservatives really got angry. That was in the mid and late 1960s. Right. When Nixon ran for president in 1968 and again in 1972, he talked about permissiveness and the idea that churches were crumbling and the military was crumbling. Everything was getting lax and loose and permissive. Nixon tapped into that fear and rode it into power, but he didn’t govern that way. He was more interested in confounding his enemies, and sometime that meant doing it to the left. Was Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 more about retrenchment or more about ideology? I think 1964 was more about ideology and 1968 was more about fear. People had gotten very anxious over cities burning and campus protests and the Vietnam War. Does think the “take back our country” language that Donald Trump and his supporters use is a response to something particular? It’s a lot of things, but a lot of it is about Trump cashing in on being against political correctness — that idea that you have to be super sensitive about minorities while poor white males are getting the shaft from the system and from Wall Street. People think that comes from liberal elites. He appeals to lower-middle-class whites who feel like they’re getting screwed. Also, the coarsening of our culture has made Trump’s bullying acceptable. It’s OK to brag and boast and bully. People like that. You used to see more value placed on modesty and humility. Trump violates those norms, and he’s rewarded for it. Why do people want a presidential candidate to be like that? I think people are growing up in a culture where that’s normal. It’s the way things are, and you can get ahead by pushing people around. Did populist sentiment factor into the elections from 1960 to 1972? A little bit. Populism has been there for a long time, but it’s never gotten to 51 percent. What’s amazing about this election cycle is that there’s a chance that raw, nativist populism could get to 51 percent. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suggest that the sentiment is stronger, maybe, than any other time in our history. I wonder if part of the difference between this year and the last two elections is that there were consensus moderates and diffuse far-right candidates in 2008 and 2012, and this year it’s the opposite. Romney certainly benefitted from the far-right candidates beating each other up. Do you see Nixon and Reagan as pragmatist presidents? Oh, definitely. They were people who could deal with the other side. Reagan worked with Tip O’Neill on tax reform. Nixon made all sorts of deals on Capitol Hill. People who support Donald Trump and Ted Cruz really seem to want a president who will not make a deal with anybody. We’ve seen that from the rejectionists in the House for the last few years. It was enough to bring down a Speaker. They can’t compromise because it means giving President Obama something he wants — even if it’s what they want. I’ve covered Congress for many years. In the 1980s, congressmen socialized with each other. Now, they all live in their districts and commute to Washington. They used to drink and whore together — there was [the Quorum Club] at the Carroll Arms Hotel that was run by Bobby Baker, one of LBJ’s aides. The Carroll Arms Hotel was used by Democrats and Republicans. Sen. George Smathers was a Democrat, and he would lead the bipartisan drinking and whoring. Sen. Chris Dodd once told me that the worst thing that happened to Congress was when they started getting unlimited flights back to their districts. It used to just be a few trips a year. Nobody lives in Washington today. And money is a bigger factor now. The worst part of that is the time they have to spend raising the money. They’re over at their party headquarters dialing for dollars every day. I don’t think it’s the expenditures as much as the sheer amount of time that makes congressmen more dependent on interest groups.In February 1974, two months before he resigned from office amid the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon proposed Obamacare. He didn’t call it that — he called it the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan — but the broad outlines of his proposal look awfully familiar. The plan included a mandate that employers provide coverage to all full-time employees. It would have created a federal program called Assisted Health Insurance to provide coverage to everyone not covered by Medicare, Medicaid or an employer plan. And it would have included a panel of physicians that would control medical costs by “reducing needless hospitalization.” The leading Republicans on the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees supported Nixon’s 1974 plan, which the New York Times said was “vastly more liberal than the one he introduced in 1971” that would have provided less comprehensive indigent care. Congress failed to act on the 1974 proposal — not because of Watergate but because the House Ways and Means Committee could not settle on one of three competing versions of the plan. Nixon did, however, sign a long list of other progressive legislation, including the laws that created the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He expanded the reach of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He put two justices on the Supreme Court who would later vote with the majority on Roe v. Wade. Evan Thomas, a former reporter and editor at Newsweek, has written books about Bobby Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt. His latest, the biography "Being Nixon: A Man Divided," is just out in paperback. Thomas sat down with Salon to talk about Nixon in the 1960s and whether he would recognize the Republican Party of 2016. (Short answer: No.) How factional was the Republican primary in 1960? The primaries barely existed in 1960, and Nixon was essentially the designated heir that year. Back then a candidate only entered the primary in a handful of states, right? That’s right. Kennedy only entered the primaries in five or six states. Until 1968, the bosses ran the show. After 1968 blew up in Chicago, the parties gave up some of that control. What was the demographic profile of Republican voters in 1960? In 1960, there were Main Street Republicans like Bob Dole. There were Northeast moderate to liberal Republicans who were conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social issues like John Lindsay and Bill Scranton. And that was basically it. The John Birch Society types were still Democrats at that time. The far right was such a small group. It mushroomed by 1964 with Barry Goldwater, but it was much smaller in 1960. Nixon hated the Birchers; they were way too far to the right for him. The election in 1960 was very close, so Richard Nixon winning that year would not necessarily have represented a conservative mandate. No. Nixon was a populist and played to people’s fears, and he could sound conservative when he tried to appeal to southern Democrats. But he was more often moderate in the tradition of Northeast moderates and believed the government had some responsibilities. If you look at his first term as president after the 1968 election, he signed a lot of legislation. Part of that was Democrats on Capitol Hill, but he believed that government had to govern. He passed as much social welfare legislation as Lyndon Johnson. He would get drummed out of the party today as a liberal. So would Ronald Reagan. And so would Reagan. The Republican Party have gone far to the right. Between the 1960 election and the 1964 election, you have the Kennedy assassination, the March on Washington, and the police actions in Birmingham. Did those things provoke conservatives toward Barry Goldwater? The anger on the right was always puzzling to East Coast establishment people like my parents. Where is the anger coming from? I think it came from where populism always comes from. When parts of the country feel disaffected and left behind and feel like the liberal elites are in charge, it makes many people angry. There was a feeling of gradual government creep from the New Deal through World War II, through the Eisenhower years, and through Kennedy. When the cities and the campuses started blowing up, conservatives really got angry. That was in the mid and late 1960s. Right. When Nixon ran for president in 1968 and again in 1972, he talked about permissiveness and the idea that churches were crumbling and the military was crumbling. Everything was getting lax and loose and permissive. Nixon tapped into that fear and rode it into power, but he didn’t govern that way. He was more interested in confounding his enemies, and sometime that meant doing it to the left. Was Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 more about retrenchment or more about ideology? I think 1964 was more about ideology and 1968 was more about fear. People had gotten very anxious over cities burning and campus protests and the Vietnam War. Does think the “take back our country” language that Donald Trump and his supporters use is a response to something particular? It’s a lot of things, but a lot of it is about Trump cashing in on being against political correctness — that idea that you have to be super sensitive about minorities while poor white males are getting the shaft from the system and from Wall Street. People think that comes from liberal elites. He appeals to lower-middle-class whites who feel like they’re getting screwed. Also, the coarsening of our culture has made Trump’s bullying acceptable. It’s OK to brag and boast and bully. People like that. You used to see more value placed on modesty and humility. Trump violates those norms, and he’s rewarded for it. Why do people want a presidential candidate to be like that? I think people are growing up in a culture where that’s normal. It’s the way things are, and you can get ahead by pushing people around. Did populist sentiment factor into the elections from 1960 to 1972? A little bit. Populism has been there for a long time, but it’s never gotten to 51 percent. What’s amazing about this election cycle is that there’s a chance that raw, nativist populism could get to 51 percent. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suggest that the sentiment is stronger, maybe, than any other time in our history. I wonder if part of the difference between this year and the last two elections is that there were consensus moderates and diffuse far-right candidates in 2008 and 2012, and this year it’s the opposite. Romney certainly benefitted from the far-right candidates beating each other up. Do you see Nixon and Reagan as pragmatist presidents? Oh, definitely. They were people who could deal with the other side. Reagan worked with Tip O’Neill on tax reform. Nixon made all sorts of deals on Capitol Hill. People who support Donald Trump and Ted Cruz really seem to want a president who will not make a deal with anybody. We’ve seen that from the rejectionists in the House for the last few years. It was enough to bring down a Speaker. They can’t compromise because it means giving President Obama something he wants — even if it’s what they want. I’ve covered Congress for many years. In the 1980s, congressmen socialized with each other. Now, they all live in their districts and commute to Washington. They used to drink and whore together — there was [the Quorum Club] at the Carroll Arms Hotel that was run by Bobby Baker, one of LBJ’s aides. The Carroll Arms Hotel was used by Democrats and Republicans. Sen. George Smathers was a Democrat, and he would lead the bipartisan drinking and whoring. Sen. Chris Dodd once told me that the worst thing that happened to Congress was when they started getting unlimited flights back to their districts. It used to just be a few trips a year. Nobody lives in Washington today. And money is a bigger factor now. The worst part of that is the time they have to spend raising the money. They’re over at their party headquarters dialing for dollars every day. I don’t think it’s the expenditures as much as the sheer amount of time that makes congressmen more dependent on interest groups.

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Published on April 04, 2016 15:58

Donald Trump sets his campaign on fire: A self-destructive madman has decided he wants to lose

Could our modern-day PT Barnum, Donald Trump, injure his chances any more than with this week’s damaging extravaganza? Let's not count out an arguable new strategy to lose and get out while he can. What else explains such a concentrate parade of unforced, self-destructive gaffes? Is Trump so arrogantly out of touch, so profoundly ignorant, after such an amazing run, that he's gunning for this era’s least-conscious candidate prize? With no one else close?  Or could the last horrendous week anticipate a kind of save-your-ego, Trumpian damage control to deflect looming humiliation? Plus, this week's self-sabotage, conscious or not, goes beyond his revealing, dangerously reckless interviews with the New York Times and the Washington Post in which he sounds like a college freshman, having skipped all the reading, faking his way through the final exam. Alas, I was hoping Trump would get close enough in July to implode the regressive right-wing renegades. Easy assumption: Trump is a spoiled egomaniac who can't stand losing, let alone public humiliation that forever stamps him a confirmed "loser." Clearly, he's way over his head, unqualified even to finish the season without mortal wounds to his self-inflated skills and boasted superiority. In short, a Sarah Palin, unchecked, a rogue with more ego and acrimony. And since quitting (unlike the Palin ploy) affirms losing, that's not a ready option. Of course, he'll dream up unending establishment "unfairness" that does him in, thus this week reneging on his dishonest early pledge to support the GOP choice. Overplaying. Misplaying, Played Out But imagine: will Trump continue to make up insufferable nonsense, showing his "maverick" outlandishness even if that means total self-destruction? If so, this pathological liar could then transform withdrawal into sainted victimhood, as no "good deed" he'd done goes punished. And yet, Trump can display such mastery of the TV manipulation game that his shocking, spontaneous stupidity remains a puzzle. Here's today's explanation:Trump never really wanted to be president, the frontrunner seat is getting way too hot, and now he wants out. Being spoiled and impulsive, with only ego to lose, his Icarus-like fall could be far quicker than his rise.  A glimmer of dignity for the profoundly insecure is better than none. For this week's clear support, I cite the ex-Trump Super PAC chief and communications expert, Stephanie Cegielski, confirming what many initially believed: Trump never dreamed his prospects would soar, nor that his worn out "Birther-anti-immigration-bomb-them-into-smithereens" schtick would mesh so perfectly with an irate third of the right-wing dying to yell "Screw You" (or worse) to the hated GOP entrenchment:
Even Trump's most trusted advisors didn't expect him to fare this well " the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it. The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy. I don't think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I don't even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all. He certainly was never prepared or equipped to go all the way to the White House, but his ego has now taken over the driver's seat, and nothing else matters. The Donald does not fail. The Donald does not have any weakness. The Donald is his own biggest enemy. What was once Trump's desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks " He doesn't want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He's achieved that already and then some. . . . The hard truth is: Trump only cares about Trump.
What does the world's greatest political narcissist (after that character in North Korea) do when finding himself over his head, anxious at the prospect of winning, desperate for some exit strategy? The conundrum is how can he orchestrate a retreat while still blaming everyone else? What if Trump is sobered by badly losing Wisconsin, and that’s the beginning of the end? Remember, Trump never need facts or reality to solidify utterly insular fantasies. Can he survive these unforced, body blows? Blunder One Inventing a Cruz ambush on his wife (zero evidence), Trump crudely attacks Ted's wife for not being as pretty or sexy as his ex-model wife. Even were Cruz responsible, Trump's response costs him with women (and men) without obvious voter gain. What political doofus needlessly risks upping the current 70% negative approval by women by attacking Ms. Cruz' career and looks? Instead of playing the victim, condemning attacks on family (the high road), Trump doubles down with with abusive tantrums. Lose-lose. Blunder Two Despite blatant rally video evidence, plus indictment of his campaign manager for battery, Trump first denies anything happened, then trivializes grossly inappropriate man-handling of a known reporter. Trump refuses to suspend or fire his campaign manager, threatens his own law suits, and bellows his guy will be vindicated. Capping it off, Trump now blames and slams the victim. Good show. Again, how many millions were offended vs. how few voters gained? Does being a first-class lout reinforce Trump’s absurd quest to look presidential? Does this fiasco not presage how a deranged, lying Pres. Trump “resolves” threats, let alone illegal or criminal staff behavior? Lose-lose, big-time. Blunder Three Instead of countering evidence he knows nothing about foreign affairs, Trump pumps out an even greater barrage with reckless nuclear saber-rattling, threatening to nuke unnamed, unknown enemies. That worsens earlier "war crime" threats he'd approve murdering civilian, terrorist families. What wannabe not looking to self-destruct shoots off ballistic rhetoric about theoretical, highly improbable scenarios? How many voters rush to embrace a unilateral bully using the nuclear button to prove how tough (or bizarrely, unpredictable) he'd be? Lose-lose, plus really scary and dangerous. Blunder Four When pressed firmly by Chris Matthews on abortion, Trump commits this huge unforced error: declaring women should be punished were they to violate laws that don't and won’t ever exist. So now getting some back alley abortions invites criminal indictments? No smart politician touches this absurdity, then posits abortion could be banned -- for only then would punishment, jail, fines, whatever, fit the crime. A no-win, dead end that mightily offended liberal and conservative officials and electorates. Body-blow. All in all, here’s rash of unforced disasters for this loudmouth Humpty-Dumpty. Please, what non-Trump voters won’t flee in horror from this unstable, unconscious blowhard? How many decide never ever to vote for Trump? How many Trump zealots are not now shamed to discover their paper tiger hero is a confirmed political bozo? Outcome Clear, Motivation Less So Whether the latest Cruz surge, or simmering derangements, Trump is needlessly aborting his own, now diminished chances. This monumentally flawed wannabe may not still want to be. If Trump keeps shooting himself in the foot, even Cruz, a dubious general election figure, will topple him. Would Trump, the icon of self-protective defensiveness, not start sniffing a way out before the carnage hits the fan? Suddenly, coming in second returns him to his first shot, as the noble "protest candidate" who never wins -- thus deflecting failure as president. Perhaps this torrent of Trump blunders are no more than the toll of a grueling campaign, rightly identifying an unqualified candidate before the fiasco. Can anyone reverse blood-curling gaffes upon gaffes? Who can't imagine Trump's PR skills, shifting to obvious damage control, trying to recoup his lost dignity? These are genuine, self-inflicted body blows. And rest assured: the media will take him apart with the same relish that it irresponsibly spring-loaded him. Retribution of sorts for media malpractice and a candidate who never should have lasted a month.  

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Published on April 04, 2016 15:57

His most terrifying interview yet: Why Trump’s sit down with Bob Woodward should have America petrified

A 7th grader recently gave this answer when he was asked why Abraham Lincoln succeeded:
"Well, I think Lincoln succeeded for numerous reasons. He was a man who was of great intelligence, which most presidents would be. But he was a man of great intelligence, but he was also a man that did something that was a very vital thing to do at that time. Ten years before or 20 years before, what he was doing would never have even been thought possible. So he did something that was a very important thing to do, and especially at that time."
No, that wasn't actually a 7th grader who didn't do his homework. That was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump, who has obviously not given a thought to history of any kind since he put away his Prince Valiant comics. That comment is from the latest in a series of bizarre long form interviews with the press which was conducted by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post and may give the most insight into the mind of Donald Trump of all of them. Many politicians robotically stick to their talking points. (Recall Marco Rubio's spectacular meltdown earlier this year.) But that is a calculated and practiced tactic in which the candidate uses every opportunity to get his or her message out regardless of the question. Trump appears to be doing something much more common and prosaic: He changes the subject when he doesn't have an answer to the question.  He does return again and again to his talking points, but they are unrelated to policies and issues.  Everything is personalized and refers back to his own experiences which appear to be quite limited for a man of his wealth and opportunity. Indeed, he seems to have decided very early in life on a set of simple beliefs about the way the world works and has never questioned them. Pressed by Bob Woodward on the fact that he's alienated so many people in the party and will need to reach out and build alliances, he said this:
"The coalition building for me will be when I win. Vince Lombardi, I saw this. He was not a big man. And I was sitting in a place with some very, very tough football players. Big, strong football players. He came in — these are tough cookies — he came in, years ago — and I’ll never forget it, I was a young man. He came in, screaming, into this place. And screaming at one of these guys who was three times bigger than him, literally. And very physical, grabbing him by the shirt. Now, this guy could’ve whisked him away and thrown him out the window in two seconds. This guy — the player — was shaking. A friend of mine. There were four players, and Vince Lombardi walked in. He was angry. And he grabbed — I was a young guy — he grabbed him by the shirt, screaming at him, and the guy was literally. . . . And I said, wow. And I realized the only way Vince Lombardi got away with that was because he won. This was after he had won so much, okay? And when you have these coaches that are just as tough as him but they don’t win, there’s revolutions. Okay? Nobody. . . . But Vince Lombardi was able to win, and he got — I have never seen anything like it. It was such a vivid impression. You had this big powerful guy, and you had Vince Lombardi, and he grabbed him by the shirt and he was screaming at him, he was angry at him."
The assumption is that once he vanquishes all his rivals everyone will fear him and do his bidding. In other words, if you win you can get away with anything. That is his definition of leadership. Lately the public and the political establishment are pressing him harder on substance --- or perhaps they're just taking him seriously at long last. Last week he stunned the country with his comments about punishing women for having abortions, a position he meandered into by failing to understand that the right has its own kind of political correctness. But what he has been saying about nuclear policy is so reckless that President Obama was moved to comment on it, saying "the person who made the statements doesn't know much about foreign policy or nuclear policy or the Korean Peninsula or the world generally." Unfortunately, Trump didn't get the message and continued to insist that Japan and South Korea either hand over more money to the United States or build their own nuclear weapons. This comment at a campaign event on Saturday was chilling:
"I would rather have them not arm, but I'm not going to continue to lose this tremendous amount of money. And frankly, the case could be made that let them protect themselves against North Korea. They'd probably wipe them out pretty quick. If they fight, you know what, that'd be a terrible thing. Terrible. ... But if they do, they do."
Nuclear war would certainly be a terrible thing, no doubt about it. But what are you going to do? The Woodward/Costa interview spent more time trying to get him to talk about economics and, as usual, he meandered around talking about himself and his business, repeating all his stock lines. But he did say a few things that made some headlines, particularly his belief that the country is currently in a "bubble" that's going to burst soon and throw the country into a terrible recession. Basically, his "theory," if you want to call it that, is that the bubble has something to do with the 19 trillion dollar national debt and an outrageously high 20 percent unemployment rate (which he is aware of because his rallies are so popular) and a stock market inflated by cheap money that only rich people can access. This "economic bubble" is also due to the fact that the smart bankers who make $50 million a year aren't allowed to run the banks anymore and government regulators have taken over. So he is determined to slash taxes to the bone and also pay off the 19 trillion in 8 years. Needless to say the economy will be roaring because he will have made America great again. And then there are all the foreigners who are humiliating us:
"Part of the reason it’s precarious is because we are being ripped so badly by other countries. We are being ripped so badly by China. It just never ends. Nobody’s ever going to stop it. And the reason they’re not going to stop it is one of two. They’re either living in a world of the make-believe, or they’re totally controlled by their lobbyists and their special interests. Meaning people that want it to continue. Because what China, what Mexico, what Japan – I don’t want to name too many countries, because I actually do business in a lot of these countries – but what these countries are doing to us is unbelievable. They are draining our jobs. They are draining our money.
"I can fix it. I can fix it pretty quickly. ... What I would do – and before I talk about legislation, because I think frankly this is more important – number one, it’s going to be a very big tax cut.  You know, I put in a plan for tax cuts, and I’ve gotten some very good reviews. I would do a tax cut. You have to do a tax cut. Because we’re the highest-taxed nation in the world But I would start ... I would immediately start renegotiating our trade deals with Mexico, China, Japan and all of these countries that are just absolutely destroying us.
"We’re not a rich country. We’re a debtor nation. We’ve got to get rid of – I talked about bubble. We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt." How long would that take? "Well, I would say over a period of eight years."
This post at the Washington Post's Wonkblog examines the specific claims and explains why they're bonkers although the idea that massive tax cuts and renegotiating trade deals would retire $19 trillion in debt in 8 years is so mind-boggling it's probably unnecessary to think too much about this. You don't need to be an economist to question Trump's expertise. When Woodward pushed on the bubble issue, Trump tooted his own horn as an economic "prognosticator"
People would pay me money for speeches on success. So I would do that, before this. And I would tell people, don’t invest that, don’t go – I was pretty good at prognostication, at telling people what to do in terms of. . . . Now, I’d talk about success, but I’d say, this is a bad time to invest. I also said, this is a good time to invest.
If the past is any indication, if Trump says it's a good time to invest, your best bet is to take your money and run:
In the spring of 2006, the tycoon hosted a glitzy event at Trump Tower to introduce Trump Mortgage LLC, a new firm that specialized in selling residential and commercial real estate loans. He devoted a floor of the Trump Organization headquarters at 40 Wall Street to the new business. And his picture appeared atop the company website with the instruction: “Talk to My Mortgage Professionals now!”
 “I think it’s a great time to start a mortgage company,”  Trump told a CNBC interviewer in April 2006, adding that “the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come.”
Within 18 months the housing market was in free fall. Trump Mortgage closed its doors, leaving some of it's bills outstanding and Trump blamed his employees for the failure. The interview is long but it's well worth reading. It does leave you with a sense of a Donald Trump you don't normally see in such an extended way and it's downright surreal that he's very close to winning the Republican nomination for president. How is it possible that a man with such overwhelming solipsism and titanic ego can have so little knowledge to show for it?

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Published on April 04, 2016 15:00

Inside the Panama Papers: Massive leak shows just how extensive corruption is worldwide, implicating politicians, human traffickers and drug dealers

"My life is in danger," read an anonymous message. "No meeting, ever." "Why are you doing this?" a German newspaper asked. "I want to make these crimes public," the whistleblower wrote. An enormous cache of documents was just released, exposing how political and economic elites from around the planet are stashing their money in secretive tax havens. The Panama Papers is one of the biggest leaks in history. Substantially larger than WikiLeaks' 2010 release of U.S. diplomatic cables or Edward Snowden's 2013 release of NSA files, the leak consists of 11.5m documents from the world's fourth-largest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. At a massive 2.6 terabytes in size, the Panama Papers reveal information about 214,000 companies. An anonymous source leaked the trove to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The publication subsequently shared these files with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which subsequently collaborated with news outlets worldwide. In what is being called "the largest cross-border media collaboration ever undertaken," at least 370 journalists working for more than 100 media organizations in 80 countries sifted for over a year through the documents, which show just how widespread corruption is throughout the world. Among those implicated in the scandal are arms traders, human traffickers, drug dealers, con artists and 143 politicians — a veritable Who's Who of global leaders, including 12 current or former heads of state, along with their families and friends. Many Western media reports on the Panama Papers framed the story around Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose close friends are involved in the corruption, but he is just one small part of the much larger scandal. King Salman of Saudi Arabia and Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine, both of whom are close Western allies, are directly implicated in the corruption. A slew of other leaders are involved, including Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan; Ayad Allawi, the ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the prime minister of Iceland; Alaa Mubarak, the son of Egypt's former Western-backed dictator; and the children of Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan. Joining them are a key member of the ethics committee of international soccer association FIFA, family members of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and even the son of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. British lawmakers and the father of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron are also implicated, along with donors to political parties. So too are the families of members of China's ruling body, the politburo. Mossack Fonseca is based in Panama, but operates globally. It has at least 600 employees working in 42 countries. Its leaked records show dealings with 14,000 clients, and it is a registered agent for more than 200,000 companies connected to 200 countries. The company is one of the top creators of shell companies, institutions that allow corporations to make transactions without having to claim ownership of assets. The tax havens the Panamanian law firm operates in include the British Virgin Islands, where approximately half of the corporations are registered, along with Switzerland, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Nevada and others. More than half of the corporations involved are registered in British-administered tax havens. Major banks have pushed hard for the creation of these opaque companies, the Panama Papers reveal. Economic and political elites collaborated in order to keep the corruption as difficult as possible to trace. Even more shocking in the documents is the revelation that, in some cases, fixers and middlemen tried to protect themselves and their clients by not only hiding questionable transactions, but also by backdating and even destroying documents. Nearly 40 years of records are included in the release, from the late 1970s through the end of 2015. Mossack Fonseca firmly denies that it has been involved in any illegal activity, and refuses to comment on the cases, citing client confidentiality. Use of offshore tax havens are in some countries perfectly legal. In others, it may be in a murky legal gray area for elites to hide their wealth there. "Most of the services the offshore industry provides can be used for legal purpose and are by law-abiding customers," the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists explained. "But the documents show that banks, law firms and other offshore players often fail to follow legal requirements to make sure clients are not involved in criminal enterprises, tax dodging or political corruption." This is actually not the first time Mossack Fonseca has been exposed. Investigative journalist Ken Silverstein released a report in December 2014 detailing how the law firm works with oligarchs, money launderers and dictators. A year and a half later, however, the release of a gargantuan cache of the company's records show just how far this network of corruption spreads around the globe. The release of the Panama Papers comes mere days after the revelation of another scandal involving the shadowy company Unaoil. An explosive investigation found that the Monaco-based company exploits the widespread corruption in the Global South, charging multinational corporations multi-million dollar fees and then bribing government officials in oil-rich countries in order to get good deals for these companies. In the process, the little-known firm fuels inequality and helps destabilize natural resource-rich conflict areas in these countries, some of which are also implicated in the Panama Papers scandal. Both leaks shine further light on the international schemes of economic and political elites.

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Published on April 04, 2016 14:22

“His Dark Materials” fans, rejoice: This new adaptation could actually do Philip Pullman’s novels justice

What happened? One of the strangest missed opportunities in recent years was the film of Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass,” the first of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. How could one of the best fantasy series since Tolkien’s end up becoming such an inert film? Even with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig in the leads, the movie came across as an overblown spectacle with very little heart, memorable mostly for its armored polar bears. Fans of Pullman’s books are not only getting a second chance, they’re getting one with a much better chance of doing the novels justice: The previously announced project by the BBC now has the “Dr. Who” producer team Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner and screenwriter Jack Thorne, who established his reputation with “Skins.” If done right, “His Dark Materials” should have some of the same tone as “Dr. Who” – its mix of cheeky, geeky, intense, and obsessive. But the best thing about the project is that the BBC seems committed to adapting all the books. The trilogy – “The Golden Compass,” “The Subtle Knife,” and “The Amber Spyglass” – sits somewhere between “The Lord of the Rings,” the Harry Potter books, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Earthsea” series, and “Paradise Lost.” The books follow a 12-year-old girl who has grown up in a college at Oxford and is launched into an adventure in multiple universes. Any description of it will make it sound like just another YA series – especially the way people are accompanied by an animal daemon and her meeting with a boy named Will -- but these books hit a sweet spot that make them ideal for adults as well. They include subtexts about quantum theory and atheism and Calvinism, quotes from Blake and Rilke, and a complicated philosophical frame. The story gets more sweeping and expansive as it goes on. By the end, it’s truly cosmic. They’re the kind of books, in other words, that really need to be stretched out the way the BBC will, with eight parts planned. The film felt cramped at two hours; New Line cut the movie mercilessly, and director Chris Weitz saw his vision for the film destroyed. So I’m hoping that not only will the BBC and the others back off a bit, but that they’ll capture some of the depth of the novels. That means letting the ideas – Pullman’s religious skepticism for instance – into the adaptation instead of running scared. The film avoided most references to religion, but the Catholic Church and others described the movie as an attack on religion, which it wasn’t. But the series needs to take Pullman’s criticism of religion seriously. Britain has a much different religious landscape than the U.S. – and suspicion of Catholic hegemony, which ruled Britain for centuries, is deeply rooted there. It wasn’t religion itself that Pullman hated, but its strict hierarchies and censorious and pleasure-denying tendencies. "Every advance in human life," Pullman wrote in the series’ second novel, "every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." Take this argument and the other ideas out of the adaptation and you get mostly an overblown adventure story about two kids and armored polar bears. A 20th anniversary assessment of the novels on Vox got at what makes them distinctive: “The trilogy presents the world in ways that can be shocking when you're a child and are still compelling when you’re an adult: It grows with you in the way the best books always do.” These books have sold more than 17 million copies. You don’t have to be an atheist or a fantasy nut to check them out any more than you need to be obsessed with India to love Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” And given what the BBC has done with the Sherlock Holmes stories and “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” these new details are likely to be the best news bookworms will get all week.What happened? One of the strangest missed opportunities in recent years was the film of Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass,” the first of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. How could one of the best fantasy series since Tolkien’s end up becoming such an inert film? Even with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig in the leads, the movie came across as an overblown spectacle with very little heart, memorable mostly for its armored polar bears. Fans of Pullman’s books are not only getting a second chance, they’re getting one with a much better chance of doing the novels justice: The previously announced project by the BBC now has the “Dr. Who” producer team Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner and screenwriter Jack Thorne, who established his reputation with “Skins.” If done right, “His Dark Materials” should have some of the same tone as “Dr. Who” – its mix of cheeky, geeky, intense, and obsessive. But the best thing about the project is that the BBC seems committed to adapting all the books. The trilogy – “The Golden Compass,” “The Subtle Knife,” and “The Amber Spyglass” – sits somewhere between “The Lord of the Rings,” the Harry Potter books, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Earthsea” series, and “Paradise Lost.” The books follow a 12-year-old girl who has grown up in a college at Oxford and is launched into an adventure in multiple universes. Any description of it will make it sound like just another YA series – especially the way people are accompanied by an animal daemon and her meeting with a boy named Will -- but these books hit a sweet spot that make them ideal for adults as well. They include subtexts about quantum theory and atheism and Calvinism, quotes from Blake and Rilke, and a complicated philosophical frame. The story gets more sweeping and expansive as it goes on. By the end, it’s truly cosmic. They’re the kind of books, in other words, that really need to be stretched out the way the BBC will, with eight parts planned. The film felt cramped at two hours; New Line cut the movie mercilessly, and director Chris Weitz saw his vision for the film destroyed. So I’m hoping that not only will the BBC and the others back off a bit, but that they’ll capture some of the depth of the novels. That means letting the ideas – Pullman’s religious skepticism for instance – into the adaptation instead of running scared. The film avoided most references to religion, but the Catholic Church and others described the movie as an attack on religion, which it wasn’t. But the series needs to take Pullman’s criticism of religion seriously. Britain has a much different religious landscape than the U.S. – and suspicion of Catholic hegemony, which ruled Britain for centuries, is deeply rooted there. It wasn’t religion itself that Pullman hated, but its strict hierarchies and censorious and pleasure-denying tendencies. "Every advance in human life," Pullman wrote in the series’ second novel, "every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." Take this argument and the other ideas out of the adaptation and you get mostly an overblown adventure story about two kids and armored polar bears. A 20th anniversary assessment of the novels on Vox got at what makes them distinctive: “The trilogy presents the world in ways that can be shocking when you're a child and are still compelling when you’re an adult: It grows with you in the way the best books always do.” These books have sold more than 17 million copies. You don’t have to be an atheist or a fantasy nut to check them out any more than you need to be obsessed with India to love Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” And given what the BBC has done with the Sherlock Holmes stories and “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” these new details are likely to be the best news bookworms will get all week.What happened? One of the strangest missed opportunities in recent years was the film of Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass,” the first of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. How could one of the best fantasy series since Tolkien’s end up becoming such an inert film? Even with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig in the leads, the movie came across as an overblown spectacle with very little heart, memorable mostly for its armored polar bears. Fans of Pullman’s books are not only getting a second chance, they’re getting one with a much better chance of doing the novels justice: The previously announced project by the BBC now has the “Dr. Who” producer team Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner and screenwriter Jack Thorne, who established his reputation with “Skins.” If done right, “His Dark Materials” should have some of the same tone as “Dr. Who” – its mix of cheeky, geeky, intense, and obsessive. But the best thing about the project is that the BBC seems committed to adapting all the books. The trilogy – “The Golden Compass,” “The Subtle Knife,” and “The Amber Spyglass” – sits somewhere between “The Lord of the Rings,” the Harry Potter books, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Earthsea” series, and “Paradise Lost.” The books follow a 12-year-old girl who has grown up in a college at Oxford and is launched into an adventure in multiple universes. Any description of it will make it sound like just another YA series – especially the way people are accompanied by an animal daemon and her meeting with a boy named Will -- but these books hit a sweet spot that make them ideal for adults as well. They include subtexts about quantum theory and atheism and Calvinism, quotes from Blake and Rilke, and a complicated philosophical frame. The story gets more sweeping and expansive as it goes on. By the end, it’s truly cosmic. They’re the kind of books, in other words, that really need to be stretched out the way the BBC will, with eight parts planned. The film felt cramped at two hours; New Line cut the movie mercilessly, and director Chris Weitz saw his vision for the film destroyed. So I’m hoping that not only will the BBC and the others back off a bit, but that they’ll capture some of the depth of the novels. That means letting the ideas – Pullman’s religious skepticism for instance – into the adaptation instead of running scared. The film avoided most references to religion, but the Catholic Church and others described the movie as an attack on religion, which it wasn’t. But the series needs to take Pullman’s criticism of religion seriously. Britain has a much different religious landscape than the U.S. – and suspicion of Catholic hegemony, which ruled Britain for centuries, is deeply rooted there. It wasn’t religion itself that Pullman hated, but its strict hierarchies and censorious and pleasure-denying tendencies. "Every advance in human life," Pullman wrote in the series’ second novel, "every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." Take this argument and the other ideas out of the adaptation and you get mostly an overblown adventure story about two kids and armored polar bears. A 20th anniversary assessment of the novels on Vox got at what makes them distinctive: “The trilogy presents the world in ways that can be shocking when you're a child and are still compelling when you’re an adult: It grows with you in the way the best books always do.” These books have sold more than 17 million copies. You don’t have to be an atheist or a fantasy nut to check them out any more than you need to be obsessed with India to love Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” And given what the BBC has done with the Sherlock Holmes stories and “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” these new details are likely to be the best news bookworms will get all week.

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Published on April 04, 2016 14:01

The “Draft Paul Ryan” fantasy: A soothing fiction to make donor-class Republicans feel better

The enthusiasm bubbling around Ted Cruz’s campaign to derail Donald Trump’s surge to the Republican presidential nomination can’t disguise the fact that establishment Republicans, by and large, hate Ted Cruz. GOP bigwigs like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are on Team Cruz for no other reason than he represents the lesser of two evils. Cruz, for his part, is happy to have their backing, but he knows that while they half-heartedly mutter “vote Cruz,” their hearts are screaming for someone else. These poorly hidden desires and frustrations of the Republican establishment find a safely anonymous voice this morning in Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook:
One of the nation’s best-wired Republicans, with an enviable prediction record for this cycle, sees a 60% chance of a convention deadlock, and a 90% chance that delegates turn to Ryan – ergo, a 54% chance that Ryan, who’ll start the third week of July as chairman of the Republican National Convention, will end it as the nominee. “He’s the most conservative, least establishment member of the establishment,” the Republican source said. “That’s what you need to be.”
And here we see the value of Playbook – where else in political journalism can an anonymous GOP insider convert their gut feelings into precise calculations describing the high probability of a fantasy presidential outcome? This Draft Ryan movement arises out of both the Republican establishment’s love of Ryan as a politician and their distaste for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Ryan is the affable mascot of the Republican donor class: he’s young, ambitious, and prioritizes massive tax cuts for the wealthy alongside boosted military spending and huge cuts to social programs. He’ll bring back Reaganomics and turn Social Security into what it was always meant to be: a bonanza for Wall Street. Ryan has also emerged as the GOP’s savior-by-default, being the only Republican of national prominence who evinces basic political competence and/or isn’t actively loathed by huge swaths of the party. But only someone who has been determinedly ignoring every political development over the past year could possibly believe that parachuting Paul Ryan into the presidential nominating contest at the last second will fix what ails the GOP. Go back and look at the exit polls for the Republican primaries and you’ll quickly see a theme emerge: Republican voters don’t just dislike the GOP establishment, they feel betrayed by the party. In New Hampshire, where Trump dominated, half of the Republican electorate felt the party had betrayed them. In Ohio, 57 percent of Republicans told exit pollsters that they felt betrayed, while in North Carolina the number was 54 percent. These numbers repeat themselves in state after state, all over the country. Now imagine what happens when all those Republican voters who griped about the party establishment’s betrayal see the party establishment toss the candidates they voted for off to the side so that the Speaker of the House can be installed as the Republican presidential candidate – the same Speaker who ran on the last Republican ticket and lost badly. Per the donor-class fantasy, Ryan emerges triumphant from the convention and unites the party (everyone from Grover Norquist to Charles Koch) as he cruises to victory in November with an undeniably appealing platform centered on cutting taxes for the wealthy and making poor people sign contracts promising to stop being poor. In the real world, Ryan would face persistent and unanswerable questions about his legitimacy as a nominee who spent zero days campaigning for the nomination. At the same time, erstwhile frontrunner Donald Trump goes on a scorched-earth campaign deriding the GOP for ignoring the voters and elevating “loser” Paul Ryan to the top of the ticket. (And, for what it’s worth, hypothetical match-ups show Ryan losing badly to both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.) Whatever enthusiasm there is for Paul Ryan as the 2016 nominee exists because there are still influential people within the party who refuse to acknowledge just how damaged Republican politics have become. They’re clinging to the palliative fiction that all the fissures Trump and Cruz have ripped open and exploited can be mended simply by nominating a sufficiently charismatic vessel for donor-class Republicanism. It didn’t work with Marco Rubio, and there’s no reason to think Paul Ryan will have any more success.The enthusiasm bubbling around Ted Cruz’s campaign to derail Donald Trump’s surge to the Republican presidential nomination can’t disguise the fact that establishment Republicans, by and large, hate Ted Cruz. GOP bigwigs like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are on Team Cruz for no other reason than he represents the lesser of two evils. Cruz, for his part, is happy to have their backing, but he knows that while they half-heartedly mutter “vote Cruz,” their hearts are screaming for someone else. These poorly hidden desires and frustrations of the Republican establishment find a safely anonymous voice this morning in Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook:
One of the nation’s best-wired Republicans, with an enviable prediction record for this cycle, sees a 60% chance of a convention deadlock, and a 90% chance that delegates turn to Ryan – ergo, a 54% chance that Ryan, who’ll start the third week of July as chairman of the Republican National Convention, will end it as the nominee. “He’s the most conservative, least establishment member of the establishment,” the Republican source said. “That’s what you need to be.”
And here we see the value of Playbook – where else in political journalism can an anonymous GOP insider convert their gut feelings into precise calculations describing the high probability of a fantasy presidential outcome? This Draft Ryan movement arises out of both the Republican establishment’s love of Ryan as a politician and their distaste for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Ryan is the affable mascot of the Republican donor class: he’s young, ambitious, and prioritizes massive tax cuts for the wealthy alongside boosted military spending and huge cuts to social programs. He’ll bring back Reaganomics and turn Social Security into what it was always meant to be: a bonanza for Wall Street. Ryan has also emerged as the GOP’s savior-by-default, being the only Republican of national prominence who evinces basic political competence and/or isn’t actively loathed by huge swaths of the party. But only someone who has been determinedly ignoring every political development over the past year could possibly believe that parachuting Paul Ryan into the presidential nominating contest at the last second will fix what ails the GOP. Go back and look at the exit polls for the Republican primaries and you’ll quickly see a theme emerge: Republican voters don’t just dislike the GOP establishment, they feel betrayed by the party. In New Hampshire, where Trump dominated, half of the Republican electorate felt the party had betrayed them. In Ohio, 57 percent of Republicans told exit pollsters that they felt betrayed, while in North Carolina the number was 54 percent. These numbers repeat themselves in state after state, all over the country. Now imagine what happens when all those Republican voters who griped about the party establishment’s betrayal see the party establishment toss the candidates they voted for off to the side so that the Speaker of the House can be installed as the Republican presidential candidate – the same Speaker who ran on the last Republican ticket and lost badly. Per the donor-class fantasy, Ryan emerges triumphant from the convention and unites the party (everyone from Grover Norquist to Charles Koch) as he cruises to victory in November with an undeniably appealing platform centered on cutting taxes for the wealthy and making poor people sign contracts promising to stop being poor. In the real world, Ryan would face persistent and unanswerable questions about his legitimacy as a nominee who spent zero days campaigning for the nomination. At the same time, erstwhile frontrunner Donald Trump goes on a scorched-earth campaign deriding the GOP for ignoring the voters and elevating “loser” Paul Ryan to the top of the ticket. (And, for what it’s worth, hypothetical match-ups show Ryan losing badly to both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.) Whatever enthusiasm there is for Paul Ryan as the 2016 nominee exists because there are still influential people within the party who refuse to acknowledge just how damaged Republican politics have become. They’re clinging to the palliative fiction that all the fissures Trump and Cruz have ripped open and exploited can be mended simply by nominating a sufficiently charismatic vessel for donor-class Republicanism. It didn’t work with Marco Rubio, and there’s no reason to think Paul Ryan will have any more success.

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Published on April 04, 2016 13:26

White nationalists robocall “every Wisconsin landline” with promises Donald Trump “will respect all women”

It apparently only cost 6,000 bucks to reach every landline left in Wisconsin and that is exactly how much one of Donald Trump's top white nationalist supporters paid to encourage Wisconsinites to support his guy in Tuesday's Republican primary. "I want people to hear, to feel comfortable with, the term 'white nationalist,'" fervent Trump supporter and Los Angeles lawyer William Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Johnson's super PAC, American National, spent $6,000 to call “every Wisconsin landline” in support of Trump on Saturday evening and all day Sunday. Despite Trump's begrudging public disavowal of white nationalist support, Johnson, head of the American Freedom Party, which promotes white nationalism, has placed similar robocalls in support of Trump in Iowa, Utah, New Hampshire, Vermont and Minnesota -- almost always mentioning white nationalism alongside Trump. “I am voting for Donald Trump because he will not only be presidential, he will put America first,” Mary Minshall, an AFP supporter, says on the PAC’s Wisconsin robocall. “Furthermore, he will respect all women and will help preserve Western Civilization.” “This message is paid for by William Johnson, a farmer and a white nationalist," Johnson says to end the ad that has already been condemned by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. “I hope the people of this state are smart enough to see through that," Walker said of the ad while campaigning for Ted Cruz on Monday. Listen to the latest white nationalist robocall in support of Trump below:  It apparently only cost 6,000 bucks to reach every landline left in Wisconsin and that is exactly how much one of Donald Trump's top white nationalist supporters paid to encourage Wisconsinites to support his guy in Tuesday's Republican primary. "I want people to hear, to feel comfortable with, the term 'white nationalist,'" fervent Trump supporter and Los Angeles lawyer William Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Johnson's super PAC, American National, spent $6,000 to call “every Wisconsin landline” in support of Trump on Saturday evening and all day Sunday. Despite Trump's begrudging public disavowal of white nationalist support, Johnson, head of the American Freedom Party, which promotes white nationalism, has placed similar robocalls in support of Trump in Iowa, Utah, New Hampshire, Vermont and Minnesota -- almost always mentioning white nationalism alongside Trump. “I am voting for Donald Trump because he will not only be presidential, he will put America first,” Mary Minshall, an AFP supporter, says on the PAC’s Wisconsin robocall. “Furthermore, he will respect all women and will help preserve Western Civilization.” “This message is paid for by William Johnson, a farmer and a white nationalist," Johnson says to end the ad that has already been condemned by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. “I hope the people of this state are smart enough to see through that," Walker said of the ad while campaigning for Ted Cruz on Monday. Listen to the latest white nationalist robocall in support of Trump below:  

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Published on April 04, 2016 12:48

April 3, 2016

I fall for strangers: I thought my fantasies made me writerly and special — it took decades to see how they were ruining my life

A long, long time ago, back when I was young, unencumbered, and had the luxury of spending hours upon hours thinking about myself, I attended a family wedding where, at some point between the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony, I fell deeply, unreasonably in love with a person I would never really know. He was seven years older than I was, and his name was—of course I’m not really going to tell you his name, but let’s call him Eli.

Eli was tall, a bit imperious, and foreign. His whole demeanor seemed to me at the time to contain both a quality of mystery and a kind of irresistible magnetism that made it impossible for me to think clearly. Twice that weekend, as we talked and flirted, I felt enraptured almost to the point of vomiting. We did nothing more than kiss, but when he invited me to spend two months with him in Israel the following summer, I didn’t hesitate. I flew across the ocean, and for two months we hiked,  swam, played backgammon, ate falafel, did other things. There was little soul-baring or opening of hearts. But that was okay with me. Genuine emotional intimacy couldn't compare with the love that grew out of my daydreams. My memories of those months are a softly lit montage of romance and adventure.

After I returned home, I closed my eyes every night and imagined how it would be if we ever were reunited. I imagined our reunion, our lovemaking, our bodies entwined on some exotic, sun-drenched beach. I imagined our week-long hike through a rainforest (rainforest in Israel?), our desert wedding, our beautiful, bilingual children.

This fantasy played in my head on an endless loop, probably two or three times a day for about four years, despite the fact that our actual communication during this time involved the occasional, casual phone call and emails where we’d talk about favorite episodes of Seinfeld. We never talked about anything you'd call substantive. Nothing about our families. Nothing about our friends or our hopes or our lives: all the things I imagined we'd eventually interlace. Despite the overwhelming exteriority of our interactions (save, I guess you'd have to say, for sex), I was convinced that he was truly and profoundly the man of my dreams, that if it weren’t for the infuriating fact that we lived on separate continents, we would surely live happily ever after.

Then, five years after we’d first met, I received an email from him with the news that he was moving to Palo Alto for graduate school. Suddenly we were practically going to be neighbors.

A few weeks later, I drove to his new apartment in a trance of happiness. Finally, finally, we’d be together. I sat down at the café where we’d arranged to meet, was sitting there nervously when he came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes. I smiled. We kissed. He sat down at the table across from me and we began to talk. He was very sweet, very handsome, very nice. Nice, nice guy. Great guy. Just swell. Not a bad word from me you'll get about him.

Within 15 minutes, it was abundantly, painfully clear that we hadn't a thing in common. I was trying to be a writer. He was an engineer. I liked to talk about and share every thought that passed through my mind in thorough, at times excruciating, detail; he seemed happy to sit in silence. We made small talk the rest of the evening like two people standing beside each other in an elevator, spent the night together (why not?), but never really spoke again.

As I drove back to San Francisco, it did occur to me that, though I’d dated other men, I’d essentially wasted five years of my life fantasizing about a version of someone who didn’t exist outside my head. But amazingly, I was able to bury this realization beneath my embarrassment and eagerness to get on with the next phase of my life.

Over a decade would pass before it would finally sink in, when recalling this youthful romance, that perhaps it was an example of how my fantasy world, dream life, whatever you want to call it, which, as a writer and a creative person, I’d always thought of as something unique and beautiful, a kind of fingerprint of my soul, could actually be a force of stasis and self-sabotage — a limitation or flaw in my character, rather than a gift.

* * *

The word “fantasy” itself sounds steamy and exciting. When we think of “fantasy,” we think of sex, love, our secret dreams and desires. But fantasies don’t, in fact, have to be erotic. They can arise just as easily from a place of fear or anxiety or boredom as from arousal. Every time I sit in a flight and imagine for a microsecond a scenario by which the plane might explode or break in half or otherwise cease being in the sky, that’s a fantasy. Every time we watch a little story play out inside our head, we’re fantasizing, whether we realize it or not, and it seems to me that, though succumbing to fantasies about other people can be dangerous or self-defeating, the act of fantasizing itself is also an essential part of being human, of being capable of both abstraction and empathy. When I read a story about Syrian refugees and imagine for a moment what it would be like to have to ride across the sea at night in a dingy with my hungry, terrified children, I am fantasizing, and I do think that without the ability to make this imaginative leap, to pretend that we know people more than we do and imagine ourselves in their place, we’d all be worse off.

The problem arises when we allow our idea of a person, what we want or need them to be, to stand in for what they are. In On Balance, the psychoanalyst and literary critic Adam Phillips notes how Anna Freud famously said, "In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them." He elaborates: "So satisfying are our fantasies that they can become a refuge, a retreat from reality; if real sexual relations are too difficult -- too frustrating, too pleasurable -- in our fantasies we can have our relationships cooked exactly as we want them." This tendency, this reliance on dream-life to make my reality more palatable, has been a part of my makeup for so long that I have no memories of life without it. Eli stands out in my mind because of the duration of the fantasy. But the truth is that, on a smaller scale, this basic story has played out more times than I can count — with the men I dated when I was single, and more recently, with friends, acquaintances, family members, colleagues.

Generally, it goes something like this: I meet a new person, a new friend, another writer, a cool mom. This person enters my life and I say to myself, oh, yes, this is an excellent person, super-smart, super-cool, funny or charming or some amalgamation of the human qualities I most admire. This is my kind of person, I say to myself or to anyone who will listen, usually my husband. I adore this person. I idealize this person, this new friend, new acquaintance, whoever. But then, gradually, something happens. Or often, nothing happens, and that’s the problem. The excitement wanes. The idealization fades. Life strips the relationship of the sheen that made it so initially irresistible, and what I’m left with is an actual person, with actual problems of their own, with constraints on their time and irritating habits, an actual, unedited other person, and of course, myself. What fun is that?

This past winter, I wrote about my odd, intense friendship with a person who, upon meeting, I instantly believed was the coolest, most uninhibited, sophisticated, badass woman I’d ever known. In my mind, she came to represent youth, freedom, literary hipness, the excitement of single life in the city, all the things that I, as a married mother, felt my life was missing. For months, the brightness of the fantasy I created around how exciting and brilliant she was made everything else in my life seem dim by comparison. But as our friendship evolved, I began to see how much of this excitement I’d projected onto her, how much of it arose precisely from the fact that she wasn’t actually in my life the way my other friends and family were.

When I confessed this to her, she didn’t argue. “It’s true,” she said to me one day on the phone. “That’s just your own shit that you’re projecting onto me. My life is really quiet and boring. Last night I stayed up late watching clips of Bernie Sanders and Larry David while I ate pistachios in bed. That’s my exciting, single life.”

In the months that followed, we were able to build upon the ruins of this fantasy something more like an actual friendship, but the experience was disturbing enough that it made me begin to reexamine other adult relationships, to wonder if I’d really evolved much from my youthful fixation with the handsome stranger from abroad.

A few years before I’d met this woman, I’d created another idealized friendship, this one with a fellow instructor at a writing program where I taught. Because our office was virtual, we chatted and emailed throughout the day -- about work, yes, but also about movies, music, my children, his labrador retriever. I realized, oddly, that the best part of my work day was often spending half an hour debating with him over the best way to roast a chicken, or scrutinizing line by line the latest episode of The Wire.

I liked him so much, found him so amenable, as the narrators in all those old English novels always used to say, that I began to worry aloud to my therapist that I was developing a crush on him.

“So what," she said.

“But he’s so great,” I told her. “I feel like we could be best friends.”

“Kim,” she said. “You're as emotionally guarded as a toll booth. He's going to pay his quarter, pass through, and move along. And then there will be someone else. All of that is fine. Just don't create trouble for everyone by holding up the line. Also," she went on, "it's not possible to be best friends with someone you've never met." I took her point at the moment, but in retrospect I wonder if there's something antiquated in this thinking.

At the time I met Eli, I’d only recently opened up my first email account. Sometimes I wonder if part of my enthrallment had come from the novelty of this new mechanism of electronic relationship-building. For so much of my young life, I’d felt lonely, isolated, cut off from like-minded people. I yearned for human connections and relationships with the sort of people I knew only from books and movies, a lifeline into some other, richer world.

Now, such isolation is hard to imagine. In addition to the relationships I have with the people who share my physical space, I, like most of us with a computer, have email relationships and Facebook relationships and texting relationships and Skyping relationships. At least 20 times a day, I move my eyes over black marks on a screen and, like magic, hear someone’s voice in my head, sometimes a voice I know from memory, other times purely invented. I can’t touch these people or walk beside them but, to varying degrees, I care about them. I feel like I know them. I feel like they know me. This is absolutely true, and also, pure fantasy. It is a fiction my mind creates that feels so much like reality that it might as well be reality. 

“Do you think,” I asked another friend, “you can fall in love with someone you don’t actually know?”

He laughed. “Of course,” he said. “I think it’s much, much easier that way.”

* * *

Eventually, I had the chance to meet my new work friend. He was visiting family in the city where I lived at the time and asked if I wanted to have lunch. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Of course!”

I spent two hours deciding what I’d wear, 45 minutes on what shade of lipstick. Then, at the last minute, as I went to step outside, I found that I couldn’t open the front door of my apartment. I reached for the door knob and physically couldn’t open it, became nauseous and dizzy and texted him that I was so sorry, but I was coming down with something.

At the time, I told myself that I was demonstrating caution and self-restraint. But in retrospect, I think it was something much worse. I didn’t go to lunch with him because there was a part of me that didn’t want the fantasy to wear off, that needed to keep that shiny, idealized idea of him in my head to get through the the grunt work and dirty dishes and of every day life. So many of my real relationships had gone the way of my Israeli lover. I valued these real relationships. I didn’t want to lose them. But at the same time, I felt I couldn’t quite get from them what I needed, that I needed these other, romanticized connections to make me feel real and exciting and alive.

My work friend and I continued a virtual low-level flirtation for some time until one or both of us grew bored of the low-levelness of it. I had no interest in endangering my marriage. He had better people to woo. We probably started to annoy each other. It hurt to think of this, what had been so emotionally enlivening, as just another part quick-lived spark of an intimate friendship. But I also knew that I valued that spark, that minor fissile event, far more than I would another occasional-coffee-and-polite-kvetching friendship that seemed to be within the accepted confines of interpersonal activity.

For years, maybe for my whole life, I continued to walk this line — on one side, actual people I cared about or loved, on the other side, a shadow of them I created and projected, a thing I could keep for myself.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes, those on whom we project our fantasies get hurt in the end. For years, I thought about the disappointment I’d experienced when I discovered Eli wasn’t the person I thought he was. But what about poor Eli? Did he ever stand a chance, competing against not just another suitor but an idealized notion of himself, a facsimile I could constantly embellish and adjust to my liking? What about all the friends and relatives who, in the end, couldn’t measure up to the people I thought they were, the people I wanted and needed them to be?

A few years ago, Keith Ridgway argued in The New Yorker that though we may fool ourselves into thinking there is objective, biographical truth in our lives, what we’re actually doing when we live, love and fantasize is write fiction. He writes that, “when you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones — they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor — please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me.”

This observation stays with me as I try to become a better observer of my own mind, a better editor of my way of moving through the world, forming new bonds and maintaining the ones I’ve formed. Unlike my years of being madly in love with Eli, or the Eli of my dreams, now I have relationships with a husband and children I love, other steady figures in my life who aren’t so easy to re-envision to my liking. Because I love them, I try to hold in my head a knowledge of who they really are. Then, even as I’m holding it, they change, and I must learn to hold this changed self anew. Again and again we do this, merging what we think we know of people with what they know of themselves, forming, revising, recreating, erasing, and reinventing each other in our minds, working and struggling to see each other better.

A long, long time ago, back when I was young, unencumbered, and had the luxury of spending hours upon hours thinking about myself, I attended a family wedding where, at some point between the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony, I fell deeply, unreasonably in love with a person I would never really know. He was seven years older than I was, and his name was—of course I’m not really going to tell you his name, but let’s call him Eli.

Eli was tall, a bit imperious, and foreign. His whole demeanor seemed to me at the time to contain both a quality of mystery and a kind of irresistible magnetism that made it impossible for me to think clearly. Twice that weekend, as we talked and flirted, I felt enraptured almost to the point of vomiting. We did nothing more than kiss, but when he invited me to spend two months with him in Israel the following summer, I didn’t hesitate. I flew across the ocean, and for two months we hiked,  swam, played backgammon, ate falafel, did other things. There was little soul-baring or opening of hearts. But that was okay with me. Genuine emotional intimacy couldn't compare with the love that grew out of my daydreams. My memories of those months are a softly lit montage of romance and adventure.

After I returned home, I closed my eyes every night and imagined how it would be if we ever were reunited. I imagined our reunion, our lovemaking, our bodies entwined on some exotic, sun-drenched beach. I imagined our week-long hike through a rainforest (rainforest in Israel?), our desert wedding, our beautiful, bilingual children.

This fantasy played in my head on an endless loop, probably two or three times a day for about four years, despite the fact that our actual communication during this time involved the occasional, casual phone call and emails where we’d talk about favorite episodes of Seinfeld. We never talked about anything you'd call substantive. Nothing about our families. Nothing about our friends or our hopes or our lives: all the things I imagined we'd eventually interlace. Despite the overwhelming exteriority of our interactions (save, I guess you'd have to say, for sex), I was convinced that he was truly and profoundly the man of my dreams, that if it weren’t for the infuriating fact that we lived on separate continents, we would surely live happily ever after.

Then, five years after we’d first met, I received an email from him with the news that he was moving to Palo Alto for graduate school. Suddenly we were practically going to be neighbors.

A few weeks later, I drove to his new apartment in a trance of happiness. Finally, finally, we’d be together. I sat down at the café where we’d arranged to meet, was sitting there nervously when he came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes. I smiled. We kissed. He sat down at the table across from me and we began to talk. He was very sweet, very handsome, very nice. Nice, nice guy. Great guy. Just swell. Not a bad word from me you'll get about him.

Within 15 minutes, it was abundantly, painfully clear that we hadn't a thing in common. I was trying to be a writer. He was an engineer. I liked to talk about and share every thought that passed through my mind in thorough, at times excruciating, detail; he seemed happy to sit in silence. We made small talk the rest of the evening like two people standing beside each other in an elevator, spent the night together (why not?), but never really spoke again.

As I drove back to San Francisco, it did occur to me that, though I’d dated other men, I’d essentially wasted five years of my life fantasizing about a version of someone who didn’t exist outside my head. But amazingly, I was able to bury this realization beneath my embarrassment and eagerness to get on with the next phase of my life.

Over a decade would pass before it would finally sink in, when recalling this youthful romance, that perhaps it was an example of how my fantasy world, dream life, whatever you want to call it, which, as a writer and a creative person, I’d always thought of as something unique and beautiful, a kind of fingerprint of my soul, could actually be a force of stasis and self-sabotage — a limitation or flaw in my character, rather than a gift.

* * *

The word “fantasy” itself sounds steamy and exciting. When we think of “fantasy,” we think of sex, love, our secret dreams and desires. But fantasies don’t, in fact, have to be erotic. They can arise just as easily from a place of fear or anxiety or boredom as from arousal. Every time I sit in a flight and imagine for a microsecond a scenario by which the plane might explode or break in half or otherwise cease being in the sky, that’s a fantasy. Every time we watch a little story play out inside our head, we’re fantasizing, whether we realize it or not, and it seems to me that, though succumbing to fantasies about other people can be dangerous or self-defeating, the act of fantasizing itself is also an essential part of being human, of being capable of both abstraction and empathy. When I read a story about Syrian refugees and imagine for a moment what it would be like to have to ride across the sea at night in a dingy with my hungry, terrified children, I am fantasizing, and I do think that without the ability to make this imaginative leap, to pretend that we know people more than we do and imagine ourselves in their place, we’d all be worse off.

The problem arises when we allow our idea of a person, what we want or need them to be, to stand in for what they are. In On Balance, the psychoanalyst and literary critic Adam Phillips notes how Anna Freud famously said, "In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them." He elaborates: "So satisfying are our fantasies that they can become a refuge, a retreat from reality; if real sexual relations are too difficult -- too frustrating, too pleasurable -- in our fantasies we can have our relationships cooked exactly as we want them." This tendency, this reliance on dream-life to make my reality more palatable, has been a part of my makeup for so long that I have no memories of life without it. Eli stands out in my mind because of the duration of the fantasy. But the truth is that, on a smaller scale, this basic story has played out more times than I can count — with the men I dated when I was single, and more recently, with friends, acquaintances, family members, colleagues.

Generally, it goes something like this: I meet a new person, a new friend, another writer, a cool mom. This person enters my life and I say to myself, oh, yes, this is an excellent person, super-smart, super-cool, funny or charming or some amalgamation of the human qualities I most admire. This is my kind of person, I say to myself or to anyone who will listen, usually my husband. I adore this person. I idealize this person, this new friend, new acquaintance, whoever. But then, gradually, something happens. Or often, nothing happens, and that’s the problem. The excitement wanes. The idealization fades. Life strips the relationship of the sheen that made it so initially irresistible, and what I’m left with is an actual person, with actual problems of their own, with constraints on their time and irritating habits, an actual, unedited other person, and of course, myself. What fun is that?

This past winter, I wrote about my odd, intense friendship with a person who, upon meeting, I instantly believed was the coolest, most uninhibited, sophisticated, badass woman I’d ever known. In my mind, she came to represent youth, freedom, literary hipness, the excitement of single life in the city, all the things that I, as a married mother, felt my life was missing. For months, the brightness of the fantasy I created around how exciting and brilliant she was made everything else in my life seem dim by comparison. But as our friendship evolved, I began to see how much of this excitement I’d projected onto her, how much of it arose precisely from the fact that she wasn’t actually in my life the way my other friends and family were.

When I confessed this to her, she didn’t argue. “It’s true,” she said to me one day on the phone. “That’s just your own shit that you’re projecting onto me. My life is really quiet and boring. Last night I stayed up late watching clips of Bernie Sanders and Larry David while I ate pistachios in bed. That’s my exciting, single life.”

In the months that followed, we were able to build upon the ruins of this fantasy something more like an actual friendship, but the experience was disturbing enough that it made me begin to reexamine other adult relationships, to wonder if I’d really evolved much from my youthful fixation with the handsome stranger from abroad.

A few years before I’d met this woman, I’d created another idealized friendship, this one with a fellow instructor at a writing program where I taught. Because our office was virtual, we chatted and emailed throughout the day -- about work, yes, but also about movies, music, my children, his labrador retriever. I realized, oddly, that the best part of my work day was often spending half an hour debating with him over the best way to roast a chicken, or scrutinizing line by line the latest episode of The Wire.

I liked him so much, found him so amenable, as the narrators in all those old English novels always used to say, that I began to worry aloud to my therapist that I was developing a crush on him.

“So what," she said.

“But he’s so great,” I told her. “I feel like we could be best friends.”

“Kim,” she said. “You're as emotionally guarded as a toll booth. He's going to pay his quarter, pass through, and move along. And then there will be someone else. All of that is fine. Just don't create trouble for everyone by holding up the line. Also," she went on, "it's not possible to be best friends with someone you've never met." I took her point at the moment, but in retrospect I wonder if there's something antiquated in this thinking.

At the time I met Eli, I’d only recently opened up my first email account. Sometimes I wonder if part of my enthrallment had come from the novelty of this new mechanism of electronic relationship-building. For so much of my young life, I’d felt lonely, isolated, cut off from like-minded people. I yearned for human connections and relationships with the sort of people I knew only from books and movies, a lifeline into some other, richer world.

Now, such isolation is hard to imagine. In addition to the relationships I have with the people who share my physical space, I, like most of us with a computer, have email relationships and Facebook relationships and texting relationships and Skyping relationships. At least 20 times a day, I move my eyes over black marks on a screen and, like magic, hear someone’s voice in my head, sometimes a voice I know from memory, other times purely invented. I can’t touch these people or walk beside them but, to varying degrees, I care about them. I feel like I know them. I feel like they know me. This is absolutely true, and also, pure fantasy. It is a fiction my mind creates that feels so much like reality that it might as well be reality. 

“Do you think,” I asked another friend, “you can fall in love with someone you don’t actually know?”

He laughed. “Of course,” he said. “I think it’s much, much easier that way.”

* * *

Eventually, I had the chance to meet my new work friend. He was visiting family in the city where I lived at the time and asked if I wanted to have lunch. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Of course!”

I spent two hours deciding what I’d wear, 45 minutes on what shade of lipstick. Then, at the last minute, as I went to step outside, I found that I couldn’t open the front door of my apartment. I reached for the door knob and physically couldn’t open it, became nauseous and dizzy and texted him that I was so sorry, but I was coming down with something.

At the time, I told myself that I was demonstrating caution and self-restraint. But in retrospect, I think it was something much worse. I didn’t go to lunch with him because there was a part of me that didn’t want the fantasy to wear off, that needed to keep that shiny, idealized idea of him in my head to get through the the grunt work and dirty dishes and of every day life. So many of my real relationships had gone the way of my Israeli lover. I valued these real relationships. I didn’t want to lose them. But at the same time, I felt I couldn’t quite get from them what I needed, that I needed these other, romanticized connections to make me feel real and exciting and alive.

My work friend and I continued a virtual low-level flirtation for some time until one or both of us grew bored of the low-levelness of it. I had no interest in endangering my marriage. He had better people to woo. We probably started to annoy each other. It hurt to think of this, what had been so emotionally enlivening, as just another part quick-lived spark of an intimate friendship. But I also knew that I valued that spark, that minor fissile event, far more than I would another occasional-coffee-and-polite-kvetching friendship that seemed to be within the accepted confines of interpersonal activity.

For years, maybe for my whole life, I continued to walk this line — on one side, actual people I cared about or loved, on the other side, a shadow of them I created and projected, a thing I could keep for myself.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes, those on whom we project our fantasies get hurt in the end. For years, I thought about the disappointment I’d experienced when I discovered Eli wasn’t the person I thought he was. But what about poor Eli? Did he ever stand a chance, competing against not just another suitor but an idealized notion of himself, a facsimile I could constantly embellish and adjust to my liking? What about all the friends and relatives who, in the end, couldn’t measure up to the people I thought they were, the people I wanted and needed them to be?

A few years ago, Keith Ridgway argued in The New Yorker that though we may fool ourselves into thinking there is objective, biographical truth in our lives, what we’re actually doing when we live, love and fantasize is write fiction. He writes that, “when you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones — they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor — please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me.”

This observation stays with me as I try to become a better observer of my own mind, a better editor of my way of moving through the world, forming new bonds and maintaining the ones I’ve formed. Unlike my years of being madly in love with Eli, or the Eli of my dreams, now I have relationships with a husband and children I love, other steady figures in my life who aren’t so easy to re-envision to my liking. Because I love them, I try to hold in my head a knowledge of who they really are. Then, even as I’m holding it, they change, and I must learn to hold this changed self anew. Again and again we do this, merging what we think we know of people with what they know of themselves, forming, revising, recreating, erasing, and reinventing each other in our minds, working and struggling to see each other better.

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Published on April 03, 2016 16:30

I’m a black woman; that doesn’t mean I have a bomb in my hair

Following yet another awful terrorist attack, this one partially in an airport in Belgium, the topic of air-travel security and civil liberties is once again in the news. But my personal experience flying as a black woman shows we still have a long way to go in balancing security and the rights of individuals-- especially when those individuals aren't white. I fly frequently. Between performances, workshops, retreats and conferences, I’m typically on a domestic flight at least once a month. So I am no stranger to TSA flight requirements. I take my laptop out of my bag and put it in a separate tray. Take off my shoes. Remove my belt. Empty my pockets. Throw out my water bottle. Pack liquids under 3.4 ounces. Then, I stand with my hands over my head for scanning. And while I do my best to comply with TSA rules and policies, I am always stopped. Always. Why? Because their scanning machine says my hair may be, or possess, a security threat. Sometimes they need to “just take a look” – so I stand still while they walk around me in a circle to get a closer look at my hair. Increasingly, a TSA agent will need to pat down my hair, rake their fingers through my tresses and squeeze my scalp. And, of course, the so-called “security threat” is never found. My hair is a critical part of my self-expression, my artistic practice, a celebration of my heritage and my connection to spirit. So when TSA runs their dirty-ass latex gloves through my hair, it’s an insult. It’s racist. And it needs to stop. A couple of months ago I headed to San Francisco from New York City for an annual Echoing Ida retreat. Unsurprisingly, but infuriatingly nonetheless, my hair needed to be inspected by a TSA agent at John F. Kennedy International (JFK) airport. I had had enough. Like many millennials, I took to social media to vent my frustration. When I landed on the West Coast, I opened my Facebook app to find that a bunch of my friends had commented, mostly black women. Many were outraged and others mentioned how they too go through this experience with TSA, wondering what we could do about it.  I tweeted at TSA and their related Twitter account @AskTSA. Given my recent encounter with TSA at JFK, I was surprised to find this tweet from them for #BlackHistoryMonth: https://twitter.com/TSA/status/702931... I’m curious (and skeptical) about what changes, if any, have resulted from these partnerships. And the response from @AskTSA about my concerns was nothing short of underwhelming: https://twitter.com/AskTSA/status/702... https://twitter.com/AskTSA/status/702... The TSA’s current practice does little to respond to an agreement it made with  the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLUNC) last year. The agreement was reached after the ACLUNC filed an administrative complaint on behalf of Malaika Singleton, Ph.D. – a black woman with locs who experienced a hair pat-down after going through TSA scanning at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and again at Minneapolis International Airport (MSP) in December 2013. According to the agreement, TSA offered to ensure that “training related to nondiscrimination is clear and consistent for TSA's workforce” as well as specifically track hair pat-down complaints “from African-American females throughout the country to assess whether a discriminatory impact may be occurring at a specific TSA secured location.” Armed with this information, I vowed that the next time one of these TSA agents tried to touch my hair, I would remind them about the ACLU agreement, take names and file a complaint. I didn’t have to wait very long. I had my opportunity on Sunday, March 13, at the Raleigh Durham International Airport (RDA) in North Carolina. I was on my way home after attending and providing healing services at the BYP100 National Membership Convening. As usual, TSA needed to check my hair after scanning. I respectfully said no. When the TSA agent told me it was required, I asked for her supervisor. (Ironically, while I’m waiting, another TSA agent compliments me on my hair.) When her supervisor arrived, she said I had two options: 1) get my hair patted down where I was standing or 2) get my hair patted down in a private room. My heart was pounding. My ears were hot. I was steaming mad. It took everything I had to keep my composure. Despite my anger, I calmly explained: “I don’t want my hair touched. Every time I go through TSA security I get stopped for my hair, and other black women experience this too.” The agent replied, "It’s not just black women; Latina and Asian women get this treatment as well." She said that if I refused, I would not be able to board my plane. It was 20 minutes until boarding and I didn’t want to miss my flight. After taking her name and letting her know that I would be filing a complaint, I “allowed” (can I even call it that?) a TSA agent to pat my hair down, only after I instructed her to change her latex gloves. She squeezed my bun, raked through my scalp. And what did she find? Nothing. What a surprise. Being a black woman while flying has meant harassment: consistent and constant rummaging through my hair searching for nonexistent threats and weapons. I understand that in a post-9/11 era there is a desire to be cautious -- especially given the most recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. I too desire safety and security; however, I am not convinced that my hair is deserving of so much suspicion. While the rare instance of hair smuggling is not completely unheard of, there have to be solutions to this security query that don't involve a breach of civil liberties, racial profiling and humiliating pat-downs. There are no bombs in my bun. Ain’t no weapons of mass destruction tangled in my fro-hawk. I’m not smuggling drugs in my braids. No firearms are concealed in my pinned-up pompadour. No hidden weapons under my headwrap. I promise not to use my bobby pins to stab anyone. Nor will I use my head scarf to choke passengers. My twist-outs are harmless. My high ponytail will not kill you. My black kinky hair in all of its styles (trust, there are many) does not compromise homeland security. My hair is my crown and glory. Raised by a single mother who had a hectic schedule, I became responsible for doing my hair at the tender age of 9. So you know I take my hair seriously. I’ve done every hairdo under the sun: from bobs to bangs, Aailyah swoops to the T-Boz “Crazy Sexy Cool” cut. Short and long. A full head of hair and a frohawk. Perms, weave and natural. The list goes on. My hair is a big part of who I am. That the TSA is ill-equipped to deal with it in a routine and non-invasive manner is symptomatic of systemic racism. And I’m not the only black woman going through this. Melissa Harris-Perry, Solange Knowles and other, less famous black women experience this degradation every day. And the problem isn’t with TSA alone. TSA operates alongside a number of institutions within a framework of white supremacy that are both fascinated and threatened by what black women do with our hair and heads. In February a school administrator at a high school in Durham, North Carolina, told young black girl students to remove their West-African inspired head wraps because it violated school dress code. Black women in the workplace have been discriminated against for rocking natural hair in general and braids in particular, including Renee Rodgers, who filed a lawsuit (and lost) against American Airlines in 1981 because she was told that her cornrows violated the company’s grooming policy. And this is not just specific to corporate America -- the U.S. military made it a point to explicitly state that black hairstyles were unauthorized. Although racial references may not be explicitly stated in their policies, the practices of implementing TSA policy is having a racist impact. It should be noted that not all agents who pat down hair are white. My most recent experience involved two black women TSA agents. But to be clear: that is how systemic racism works – it’s not just about the racial identity of the TSA agents implementing these dubious practices; it's about the races that are disproportionately and unfairly impacted by the practices of TSA. More importantly, this isn’t just about TSA agents. Their technology is questionable and ineffective. As Melissa Harris Perry eloquently stated: “If your $170,000 machine can see under my clothes, but can’t figure out I’m not hiding a bomb in my braids, maybe it’s time to recalibrate the machine.” It seems logical but may not be a reality anytime soon. “We initially asked TSA to audit the scanner triggering false positives for African American hair specifically” said Novella Coleman, an ACLUNC staff attorney who worked on the TSA agreement. “TSA was unwilling to take a look at that.” In her article "The Politics of Black Women’s Hair: Why It’s Seen with Skepticism and the Need to Discipline," Brittney Cooper says “there is a long history of institutions regulating bodies in such a way that white bodies become the norm.” Indeed. So when TSA says they do not engage in discriminatory practices, they only check hair with “anomalies,” it is clear that what is outside of the norm is black hair.  

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Published on April 03, 2016 15:30

Put the blame where it belongs: Bush, Reagan, Kissinger and the real history of the rise of ISIS

If you think it's a bit crazy when elite conservatives try to blame Obama for the rise of Donald Trump, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Check out Damon Linker's establishment apologia, “The Marxist roots of Islamic extremism,” unfurled in the wake of the Brussels bombings, which seeks to stand history on its head, burying the actual anti-Communist roots of al Qaeda's genesis, and replacing them with their exact opposites. It's yet another case of envious reversal [I've written about this before here and here], which conservatives so often employ to cast themselves either as victims of liberals' illiberalism, or else as liberalism's true champions—touting anti-gay discrimination as “religious freedom,” for example. Although Linker is a conservative, he's not writing as one in this instance—he's writing on behalf of bipartisan elitism, in the name of liberalism no less—you know, the good old-fashioned John Locke, Adam Smith, just-don't-read-them-too-closely kind. But the envious reversal is still in full force.

To be fair, writers are not responsible for headlines, and Linker's argument is broader than that—it's a sweeping defense of the Western elite status quo. But it is a crucial part of what he's arguing, and it helps illuminate much of what's wrong with the rest of what he has to say, as well as what's wrong with a much wider chorus of status quo voices. So let's take out the headline absurdity first, and then survey Linker's argument more generally, to see what we can learn.

Linker warms to his subject, citing “totalitarian forms of political argument—and specifically the tendency of those influenced (sometimes unknowingly) by Marxism to embrace the goal of "heightening the contradictions,” but his real concern isn't political argument—it's actions:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there haven't been a lot of doctrinaire communist revolutionaries running around. But that doesn't mean that the idea of heightening the contradictions has disappeared. On the contrary, it has spread like a virus to other forms of anti-liberal political extremism.

Radical Islam, for example, is a highly potent mixture of motifs drawn from the Muslim past and Marxist-Leninist ideas imported through the writings of such polemicists as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi.

Groups like ISIS and al Qaeda don't think they can defeat the West through terrorism, Linker argues; they want to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash, which will radicalize persecuted Muslims to join in further terrorism:

Attack, crackdown, worse attack, more draconian crackdown, on and on, with the West eventually weakening enough that a resurgent Islam can rise as a triumphant global power.

Make things worse to make things better: a classic case of heightening the contradictions.

Some of what Linker says here is true, particularly what he says about the aims of ISIS and al Qaeda, which has been pointed out repeatedly by terrorism experts, as well both leftist and libertarian critics of U.S. interventionism. What's utterly false is the flimsy core of his argument, that Marxism is responsible for ISIS and al Qaeda, when the truth is almost entirely the opposite.

It's well-known that al Qaeda grew out of the U.S.-funded proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a war designed to give them their own Vietnam. ISIS, in turn, came out of our invasion of Iraq and subsequent actions, including the destruction of the Iraqi army. In the article linked to where Linker claims a Marxist heritage for “such polemicists as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi,” we find nothing more detailed to substantiate the claim. There is some truth in it, but as Mahmood Mamdani makes clear in his book "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror," it's equally true that their ideas gained a foothold in large part because they were useful in the Cold War fight against Soviet Communism. Moreover, the U.S. turned to supporting terrorism as a Cold War stratagem before things got started in Afghanistan. A summary of some of Mamdani's key arguments can be found in this like-named essay, where he cites 1975 as a turning-point year: America's defeat in Indochina, the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa, and the shift in Cold War focus to apply the Nixon Doctrine, that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars,” in Southern Africa, both to prop up apartheid South Africa, and to partner with them:

South Africa became both conduit and partner of the U.S. in the hot war against those governments in the region considered pro-Soviet. This partnership bolstered a number of terrorist movements: Renamo in Mozambique, and Unita in Angola. Their terrorism was of a type Africa had never seen before. It was not simply that they were willing to tolerate a higher level of civilian casualties in military confrontations -- what official America nowadays calls collateral damage. The new thing was that these terrorist movements specifically targeted civilians. It sought specifically to kill and maim civilians, but not all of them. Always, the idea was to leave a few to go and tell the story, to spread fear. The object of spreading fear was to paralyze government.

There was nothing Islamic here, even in pretense, much less was there any thread of Marxist influence on the U.S./South African side. It was pure Nixon/Kissinger realpolitik. Nothing intellectually deeper than that.  And what began in South Africa in the mid-'70s then spread:

In another decade, the center of gravity of the Cold War shifted to Central America, to Nicaragua and El Salvador. And so did the center of gravity of U.S.-sponsored terrorism. The Contras were not only tolerated and shielded by official America; they were actively nurtured and directly assisted, as in the mining of harbors.

The shifting center of gravity of the Cold War was the major context in which Afghanistan policy was framed. But it was not the only context.... The grand plan of the Reagan administration was two-pronged. First, it drooled at the prospect of uniting a billion Muslims around a holy war, a Crusade, against the evil empire.... Second, the Reagan administration hoped to turn a religious schism inside Islam, between minority Shia and majority Sunni, into a political schism. Thereby, it hoped to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution as a minority Shia affair.

It was a strategy Nixon and Kissinger would have been proud of, both “realist” and intoxicated with visions of limitless power:

This is the context in which an American/Saudi/Pakistani alliance was forged, and religious madresas turned into political schools for training cadres. The Islamic world had not seen an armed Jihad for centuries. But now the CIA was determined to create one. It was determined to put a version of tradition at the service of politics. We are told that the CIA looked for a Saudi Prince to lead this Crusade. It could not find a Prince. But it settled for the next best, the son of an illustrious family closely connected to the royal family. This was not a backwater family steeped in pre-modernity, but a cosmopolitan family. The Bin Laden family is a patron of scholarship. It endows programs at universities like Harvard and Yale.

The CIA created the Mujaheddin and Bin Laden as alternatives to secular nationalism. Just as, in another context, the Israeli intelligence created Hamas as an alternative to the secular PLO.

Secular nationalism isn't Marxism, of course. But throughout the Cold War era the two were inextricably linked as perceived threats with much in common—including figures like Iran's Mossadegh and Guatemala's Arbenz, the first two targets of CIA coups under Eisenhower, who were not Marxists themselves but were willing to engage with them independently of American control. In addition, Marxist ideas about the exploitative logic of international capitalism helped provide a framework secular nationalists could draw upon in resisting Western domination. At any rate, it was anti-communism, above all, that linked secular nationalism and Marxism together as its enemies, and then lit the fires of terrorism in response.

This is material, real-world history of where ISIS and al Qaeda came from. It came not from communism, but from anti-communism—our anti-communism. It was not these shadowy others, but as Jung would have it, our disowned shadow projected onto the others, which gave birth to the terrorist threat we now face. The thread of Marxist influence Linker calls out can surely be found, if one looks hard enough. But they only came together in the way that they did, in actual attacks on the West, because of this much broader, powerful dynamic put in motion by exactly opposite-minded people, like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan, fighting their shadowy inner demons out on the world stage.

So much for the argument that terrorism has Marxist roots. But, as always, there's a larger purpose. Marxism is being demonized once again for the same old-fashioned reason: to shut up gripes about things as they are. As Linker would have it, “Anti-liberalism is having a moment. And it's happening at all points of the political spectrum”—everything from “suicidal religious fanatics” to “anti-liberal forms of nationalistic populism” (Trump, Le Pen, etc.) and “an anti-liberal left (think the socialist Jacobin magazine)” which “has risen from the dead to challenge the liberal order, using concepts and categories derived from the Marxist tradition of social theory.” Hence, the terrorism-is-Marxism's-fault argument is Linker's ace in the hole in defending the rotten status quo as “the liberal order” against a wide-ranging grab-bag of others.

One of the most basic things wrong with Linker's way of describing things is his underlying belief in simplistic, ahistorical, true forms of things. Immediately following the above, he says “True liberals have plenty to say in response to the critics that increasingly encircle them.” But what does “true liberals” mean, setting aside that it's coming from a conservative intellectual? Linker assumes it has a clear, forthright meaning, and he's hardly alone in that. He quickly mentions “the importance of upholding such liberal norms as equal respect for individual rights and tolerance of disagreement.” Of course, the Bush administration's war on terror made a mockery of claims to respect individual rights, and Obama's drone assassinations of U.S. citizens has taken this breach of liberal norms even further. But that's the thing about true forms—they free us from having to think, care about, or even notice the grimy little details of actual people's real lives.

On the other hand, Marxism has a true form as well—defined by “the goal of 'heightening the contradictions,'” and it's the citing of this goal which Linker uses to tar “Islamic extremism” and other anti-liberals—even Tea Party Republicans—as the creatures of evil Marxist roots. Linker makes a play for framing things in terms of historical grand theory. The idea of “heightening the contradictions” had its inadvertent origins in Hegel, describing historical progress as “a dialectical process in which social, cultural, intellectual, and economic contradictions emerge and resolve themselves, only to produce new contradictions, crises, and resolutions, and so on down through the centuries and millennia.” As Linker notes, “Hegel thought that this process ultimately culminated in the modern liberal nation state,” and Marx disagreed—arguing that there are still more contradictions—specifically class-based economic ones—yet to be resolved.

Whole bookshelves have been written about this disagreement, but one point seems important to underscore here: The liberal state Hegel was defending then looks nothing like liberal democracies as we know them today.  It's a backwards, archaic artifact, that almost no one alive would vote for today. Indeed, throughout most of the 19th century in Europe, democracy itself was seen as inimical to the sort of “liberal order” that Hegel was defending, and Marxists, along with other socialists, were a driving force in opposing, and ultimately defeating that view. Other significant aspects of “the liberal order” as we know it today were utterly foreign to Hegel: women's suffrage—much less holding elective office—and gay rights, for example. Not to mention the rights of racial and ethnic minorities, though there's still tremendous variation in exactly what this means across all the different political jurisdictions that claim to be part of this “liberal order.”

In short, there's a great deal of messiness involved in the simplistic notion of a “liberal order” that Linker seeks to defend, along with a similar messiness in the Marxist tradition, and a good deal of overlap between them. If “the liberal order” of today is being challenged by an array of “anti-liberal” forces, as Linker would have it, there's nothing terribly new or surprising in that. All sorts of things “we” now strongly support and identify with were not long ago seen as dangerously other. That's the whole point of dialectics, without Hegel's self-satisfied assumption that now we've reached the end of the line.

The real task before us is not to pass judgment on things based on artificial labels, which is what status quo warriors demand that we do. We have to get down into the grimy details, where the rosy tales the elite keep peddling to us increasingly fall to pieces, and very rightly ought to be challenged—whether in Flint, Ferguson, Gaza, or the fast-food joint just down the street. Bernie Sanders is not “challenging the liberal order” in the same way that Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen or ISIS do, and simplistic efforts to lump them all together only further undermine the credibility of those, like Linker, who claim to shed light and speak for reason. Nor is the heterodox Jacobin magazine simplistically “anti-liberal left,” as if to erase self-identified left-liberals, whose very existence Linker's taxonomy cannot admit.

In early March, Nando Vila wrote a very telling analysis of the Sanders/Clinton divide, exactly the opposite of the sort of obfuscating “analysis” Linker provides. Vila explains that the underlying divide between Clinton and Sanders is an ideological one: Clinton wants to perfect the existing meritocracy, “breaking down barriers” to individual achievement. Sanders wants to create a substantially more equal distribution of rewards for all. Neither of them is a Marxist or even some other sort of “anti-liberal,” though Linker or others like him would dearly love to tar Sanders as such. But Sanders does represent a fundamental break with the elite consensus that Linker masks with his “liberal order” rhetoric. As Vila writes: "You can make the case that the 2016 election is dominated by the public’s realization that the bipartisan and unquestioned faith in the meritocracy is collapsing."

There are many reasons for this, but they surely include the incompetence and corruption of the elites—the presumed cream of the crop in the meritocracy. It's the past 15 years of elite rule, more than anything, that has heightened the contradictions in the meritocracy's sales pitch. And the more they try to change the subject (“the liberal order”), the more they blame-shift onto others (“The Marxist roots of Islamic extremism”), the more the public's faith in meritocracy is shaken.

Linker is right in one respect: We do live in perilous times. But a great deal of what is driving that peril is the relentless elite refusal to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. It's not just their hair that needs fixing. It's their shadow.

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Published on April 03, 2016 14:30