Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 830

“Please explain to us Mr. Trump”: Our gracious Japanese hosts kept asking the same question and we were hard-pressed to come up with an answer

“Perhaps you can explain to us Mr. Trump.” As the question hung in the air, the other members of the Young U.S. Researchers Delegation and I exchanged glances — wordlessly negotiating who was going to tackle the question this time. Toward the end of nearly every meeting on our week-long trip to Japan, we were asked to account for the Republican front-runner on behalf of our nation. A young woman from another organization on the delegation launched into an explanation of three decades of wage stagnation in America, and the frustration and anger at that injustice that Donald Trump has tapped into. In other meetings, other members of our group had offered similar thoughts, variously casting Trumpism as a passing backlash against a decade of social progress, rage against five years of congressional inaction, or fear of a more multipolar, unpredictable global threat landscape. The truth is, none of us fully understood Trump’s unexpected success well enough to explain it convincingly to a foreign academic or government representative. The questioner nodded politely at the answer, but the mixture of anxiety, bemusement and frustration at campaign news from across the Pacific was evident. A former ambassador we’d met earlier in the week had been less diplomatic: “We may all look the same to you, but Japan is not China! If you don’t believe me, step outside and take a deep breath,” he’d teased, after reminding us of Trump’s promise to “bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places.” Trump often tells roaring crowds, “They’re killing us!” They actually aren’t, but the line clearly resonates with the older cadre of his supporters who remember the panic around Japan’s ascendance in the 1980s and may still have paperbacks of Tom Clancy’s "Debt of Honor" and Michael Crichton’s "Rising Sun" on their bookshelves. In fact, Japan suffered two “lost decades,” and American growth today is four times Japan’s. Japanese foreign direct investment in the United States, including Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi’s combined 15 sprawling auto plants across our country, is a source of some consternation among Japanese protectionists, who complain about Japanese outsourcing to America. Trump’s casual relationship with the truth is well established, but his bellicose xenophobia on issues of trade and economics is profoundly upsetting to our closest allies, including Japan and South Korea. But it’s his rhetoric on security cooperation that’s the most troubling. “South Korea doesn't pay the United States for U.S. troops that protect their country,” he once bemoaned on "The View," an assertion that PolitiFact rated as “False.” More recently he complained that, “if Japan is attacked, the U.S. must go to its aid. But if we are attacked, we don’t get aid from Japan. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty is unfair.” In fact, Japan is in the midst of the most significant constitutional reinterpretation in its modern history. Article 9 of its pacifist postwar constitution – written chiefly by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff during the American occupation of Japan – prohibits the offensive use or threat of military force and established the Japanese armed services in 1954 as self-defense forces, rather than traditional military services. This has restricted not only Japan’s legal and practical ability to make war, but also its ability to support the allies that are integral to Japan’s security — chief among them the United States. Prime Minister Abe’s government is now in the process of approving a new interpretation of Article 9 that would maintain the strict prohibition against war-making, but would allow Japan to come to the aid of the United States under certain circumstances, like if our forces in the region were attacked (even if Japan itself was not). It would also allow them to provide greater direct support, like the provision of fuel, ammunition and medical support, to allied forces under a broader range of circumstances. The American Navy relies heavily on Japanese support already, with one Navy captain telling us, “I always want the Japanese supporting our missions. They over-plan everything, they over-engineer everything, and the result is that they always execute their role perfectly, no matter what the mission is.” So while Abe’s government bends over backward, incurring significant political costs within Japan’s large pacifist faction (not to mention the billions of dollars Tokyo spends annually on building and maintaining American military bases), to make his country the best ally it can be to America, Trump denigrates them and their commitment to the alliance. This isn’t an exclusively Asian issue, either. Our allies pay attention to how we treat our other allies. If we show wavering commitment to countries like South Korea and Japan, why should Estonia or Turkey feel confident of our support? It was humiliating to have to explain to our gracious hosts the ungracious behavior of our loudmouth presidential candidate, but our passing humiliation isn’t what’s at stake. Japan has been the linchpin of our Pacific strategy for over 60 years—a strategy that has kept the peace in the most densely populated and ideologically diverse corner of the world. A strong network of alliances underpins our entire global strategy, and while some of us have laughed darkly at Trump’s outlandish behavior, a week in Japan is a sobering reminder that he doesn’t have to actually win the election to do real harm to American national security. Nathan Kohlenberg is a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and a student of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Views expressed are his own.“Perhaps you can explain to us Mr. Trump.” As the question hung in the air, the other members of the Young U.S. Researchers Delegation and I exchanged glances — wordlessly negotiating who was going to tackle the question this time. Toward the end of nearly every meeting on our week-long trip to Japan, we were asked to account for the Republican front-runner on behalf of our nation. A young woman from another organization on the delegation launched into an explanation of three decades of wage stagnation in America, and the frustration and anger at that injustice that Donald Trump has tapped into. In other meetings, other members of our group had offered similar thoughts, variously casting Trumpism as a passing backlash against a decade of social progress, rage against five years of congressional inaction, or fear of a more multipolar, unpredictable global threat landscape. The truth is, none of us fully understood Trump’s unexpected success well enough to explain it convincingly to a foreign academic or government representative. The questioner nodded politely at the answer, but the mixture of anxiety, bemusement and frustration at campaign news from across the Pacific was evident. A former ambassador we’d met earlier in the week had been less diplomatic: “We may all look the same to you, but Japan is not China! If you don’t believe me, step outside and take a deep breath,” he’d teased, after reminding us of Trump’s promise to “bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places.” Trump often tells roaring crowds, “They’re killing us!” They actually aren’t, but the line clearly resonates with the older cadre of his supporters who remember the panic around Japan’s ascendance in the 1980s and may still have paperbacks of Tom Clancy’s "Debt of Honor" and Michael Crichton’s "Rising Sun" on their bookshelves. In fact, Japan suffered two “lost decades,” and American growth today is four times Japan’s. Japanese foreign direct investment in the United States, including Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi’s combined 15 sprawling auto plants across our country, is a source of some consternation among Japanese protectionists, who complain about Japanese outsourcing to America. Trump’s casual relationship with the truth is well established, but his bellicose xenophobia on issues of trade and economics is profoundly upsetting to our closest allies, including Japan and South Korea. But it’s his rhetoric on security cooperation that’s the most troubling. “South Korea doesn't pay the United States for U.S. troops that protect their country,” he once bemoaned on "The View," an assertion that PolitiFact rated as “False.” More recently he complained that, “if Japan is attacked, the U.S. must go to its aid. But if we are attacked, we don’t get aid from Japan. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty is unfair.” In fact, Japan is in the midst of the most significant constitutional reinterpretation in its modern history. Article 9 of its pacifist postwar constitution – written chiefly by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff during the American occupation of Japan – prohibits the offensive use or threat of military force and established the Japanese armed services in 1954 as self-defense forces, rather than traditional military services. This has restricted not only Japan’s legal and practical ability to make war, but also its ability to support the allies that are integral to Japan’s security — chief among them the United States. Prime Minister Abe’s government is now in the process of approving a new interpretation of Article 9 that would maintain the strict prohibition against war-making, but would allow Japan to come to the aid of the United States under certain circumstances, like if our forces in the region were attacked (even if Japan itself was not). It would also allow them to provide greater direct support, like the provision of fuel, ammunition and medical support, to allied forces under a broader range of circumstances. The American Navy relies heavily on Japanese support already, with one Navy captain telling us, “I always want the Japanese supporting our missions. They over-plan everything, they over-engineer everything, and the result is that they always execute their role perfectly, no matter what the mission is.” So while Abe’s government bends over backward, incurring significant political costs within Japan’s large pacifist faction (not to mention the billions of dollars Tokyo spends annually on building and maintaining American military bases), to make his country the best ally it can be to America, Trump denigrates them and their commitment to the alliance. This isn’t an exclusively Asian issue, either. Our allies pay attention to how we treat our other allies. If we show wavering commitment to countries like South Korea and Japan, why should Estonia or Turkey feel confident of our support? It was humiliating to have to explain to our gracious hosts the ungracious behavior of our loudmouth presidential candidate, but our passing humiliation isn’t what’s at stake. Japan has been the linchpin of our Pacific strategy for over 60 years—a strategy that has kept the peace in the most densely populated and ideologically diverse corner of the world. A strong network of alliances underpins our entire global strategy, and while some of us have laughed darkly at Trump’s outlandish behavior, a week in Japan is a sobering reminder that he doesn’t have to actually win the election to do real harm to American national security. Nathan Kohlenberg is a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and a student of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Views expressed are his own.“Perhaps you can explain to us Mr. Trump.” As the question hung in the air, the other members of the Young U.S. Researchers Delegation and I exchanged glances — wordlessly negotiating who was going to tackle the question this time. Toward the end of nearly every meeting on our week-long trip to Japan, we were asked to account for the Republican front-runner on behalf of our nation. A young woman from another organization on the delegation launched into an explanation of three decades of wage stagnation in America, and the frustration and anger at that injustice that Donald Trump has tapped into. In other meetings, other members of our group had offered similar thoughts, variously casting Trumpism as a passing backlash against a decade of social progress, rage against five years of congressional inaction, or fear of a more multipolar, unpredictable global threat landscape. The truth is, none of us fully understood Trump’s unexpected success well enough to explain it convincingly to a foreign academic or government representative. The questioner nodded politely at the answer, but the mixture of anxiety, bemusement and frustration at campaign news from across the Pacific was evident. A former ambassador we’d met earlier in the week had been less diplomatic: “We may all look the same to you, but Japan is not China! If you don’t believe me, step outside and take a deep breath,” he’d teased, after reminding us of Trump’s promise to “bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places.” Trump often tells roaring crowds, “They’re killing us!” They actually aren’t, but the line clearly resonates with the older cadre of his supporters who remember the panic around Japan’s ascendance in the 1980s and may still have paperbacks of Tom Clancy’s "Debt of Honor" and Michael Crichton’s "Rising Sun" on their bookshelves. In fact, Japan suffered two “lost decades,” and American growth today is four times Japan’s. Japanese foreign direct investment in the United States, including Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi’s combined 15 sprawling auto plants across our country, is a source of some consternation among Japanese protectionists, who complain about Japanese outsourcing to America. Trump’s casual relationship with the truth is well established, but his bellicose xenophobia on issues of trade and economics is profoundly upsetting to our closest allies, including Japan and South Korea. But it’s his rhetoric on security cooperation that’s the most troubling. “South Korea doesn't pay the United States for U.S. troops that protect their country,” he once bemoaned on "The View," an assertion that PolitiFact rated as “False.” More recently he complained that, “if Japan is attacked, the U.S. must go to its aid. But if we are attacked, we don’t get aid from Japan. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty is unfair.” In fact, Japan is in the midst of the most significant constitutional reinterpretation in its modern history. Article 9 of its pacifist postwar constitution – written chiefly by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff during the American occupation of Japan – prohibits the offensive use or threat of military force and established the Japanese armed services in 1954 as self-defense forces, rather than traditional military services. This has restricted not only Japan’s legal and practical ability to make war, but also its ability to support the allies that are integral to Japan’s security — chief among them the United States. Prime Minister Abe’s government is now in the process of approving a new interpretation of Article 9 that would maintain the strict prohibition against war-making, but would allow Japan to come to the aid of the United States under certain circumstances, like if our forces in the region were attacked (even if Japan itself was not). It would also allow them to provide greater direct support, like the provision of fuel, ammunition and medical support, to allied forces under a broader range of circumstances. The American Navy relies heavily on Japanese support already, with one Navy captain telling us, “I always want the Japanese supporting our missions. They over-plan everything, they over-engineer everything, and the result is that they always execute their role perfectly, no matter what the mission is.” So while Abe’s government bends over backward, incurring significant political costs within Japan’s large pacifist faction (not to mention the billions of dollars Tokyo spends annually on building and maintaining American military bases), to make his country the best ally it can be to America, Trump denigrates them and their commitment to the alliance. This isn’t an exclusively Asian issue, either. Our allies pay attention to how we treat our other allies. If we show wavering commitment to countries like South Korea and Japan, why should Estonia or Turkey feel confident of our support? It was humiliating to have to explain to our gracious hosts the ungracious behavior of our loudmouth presidential candidate, but our passing humiliation isn’t what’s at stake. Japan has been the linchpin of our Pacific strategy for over 60 years—a strategy that has kept the peace in the most densely populated and ideologically diverse corner of the world. A strong network of alliances underpins our entire global strategy, and while some of us have laughed darkly at Trump’s outlandish behavior, a week in Japan is a sobering reminder that he doesn’t have to actually win the election to do real harm to American national security. Nathan Kohlenberg is a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and a student of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Views expressed are his own.

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Adult superhero fans make Daniel Clowes sad: “People need something that has very clear moral boundaries, I guess”

It feels strange to rave about someone who’s both self-effacing and the creator of so many self-loathing characters. But the comics artist Daniel Clowes is one of the masters of the genre. As cartoonists who draw people who don’t wear capes and tights have moved from the underground to literary respectability, Clowes -- an early forerunner -- has stayed in the game without losing his edge. And he’s been an important influence on younger cartoonists like Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson, who have built on Clowes’ originality, humor, innocence and dark alienation. It was those elements that made director Terry Zwigoff’s film adaptation of Clowes’ 1997 graphic novel “Ghost World” an instant classic (and featured an undiscovered Scarlett Johansson). The 2010 book “Wilson” will become a film this fall, directed by Craig Johnson and with Woody Harrelson playing the ornery title character. As engaging as those books may be, Clowes’ new one, “Patience,” is his first real page-turner and maybe his most emotionally direct story so far. The tale of a couple hit with tragedy, it involves time travel and complex backstories. “This is a fascinating collage, repurposing elements from action thrillers, psychological horror, and romantic drama,” the Publishers Weekly review says. “Clowes skillfully anchors each psychedelic turn in human emotion.” Salon spoke to Clowes from his home in Oakland, California; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Reading “Patience,” I was struck by how different it was from your other books. But I’m not sure there’s a typical Dan Clowes book. Does it feel like a departure to you, too? I always think, “This is unlike anything I’ve ever done!” And then it settles in and fits in, without my control. I’ll start at the most obvious place: Where did the idea for this come from? It was many things. The basic situation -- of the character kind of having to go into his recent past and retrace how things got the way they did -- was of great interest to me. It was just something that had been running through my mind. I had been putting together all my work for this museum monograph, so I was starting to see my life from this perspective that you get when you hit my age, where you see the specific days and moments where things veer off into a new direction. And I could kind of see the plot of my own life -- what were the plot points, what were the reversals, all those kinds of things that actually happen to us in less dramatic ways. That’s what set me off thinking this would hold my interest. In the beginning I’m just trying to find something that’s got that engine of interest that will regenerate itself every day. This has more of an engine than most. The plot keeps moving and twisting and changing every few pages. Does that make it more difficult for you? Your other books are more character-driven. Yeah, I’ve certainly submerged the plot in my other books. In several of them I want you to not think that there is a plot, that it’s just sort of unfolding as it is. With this one, I felt like with this kind of story, for the reader to actually get out of it what I was hoping they would, just the emotions and the connections to the characters and things, I knew that you had to have a plot that would not distract you. So I knew I had to work it out so well that it felt like you were in good hands, which was a challenge. It’s a very complicated story, and I wanted it to feel not so complicated. I can’t think of another book of yours that has this much time travel. No, I don’t think I’ve ever done any of that. Did you have a favorite comic book or TV show that you used as a model for the time travel, or did you just wing it? I was kind of winging it. As a kid there was a TV show called “The Time Tunnel” that I really just truly loved. It had the greatest time machine, which was this long, conical tunnel that had a spiral pattern inside, and they would walk into that tunnel and then appear in Nazi Germany. It was oddly not at all a science-fiction show, because these guys would then be in a historical setting. So it was more like a costume drama than a time-travel show. I don’t remember a second of any of the stories except that tunnel was so powerful to me; I love that idea. I really went out of my way to not look at any time travel stuff while I was working on this. Everybody was suggesting movies to me and there were all these books that would be in the periphery of my vision that felt like, “This is exactly the same as this book.” I felt like even if I did a book that was exactly like another book unwittingly, at least there would be these differences that would have to come out, and it would be somewhat clear that I hadn’t read that thing. So that was my hope. Now I feel like I can go back and watch “Looper” and stuff like that. There’s a lot of pain in the book, but it feels like there’s less making fun of people and mocking pop culture -- both things we’ve come to expect from you. Do you feel like you’ve said goodbye to that kind of cynicism? I haven’t said goodbye to anything. I’m always open to whatever comes along with each new book. I definitely didn’t feel like doing another sort of humor book. “Wilson” was more overtly funny to me and this one has humor around the edges, I think, but there’s nothing in it just designed to make you laugh. It does feel like it’s a lot different in tone. Was it depressing to work on, or did it have an exhilarating quality? It was the latter, for sure. When I started it, I had no idea it was going to be as long as it is. I was hoping to get it under 100 pages. If you had told me, “You’re gonna be working five years on a 180-page book,” I would have clearly predicted that at the end of that I would want to shoot myself and I would never want to see the book again. I would feel so burned out, I would have guessed. And the reality was I didn’t want to stop. I really still feel I’m in the world of the story even though I finished three or four months ago. Most people don’t understand just how long it takes to do a book like this. No, they don’t. Everyone’s like, “Oh, you doodle it. You do like a page in an hour or something.” It’s all color and almost 200 pages. Do you still hand-draw everything? Every single part of it is all done by hand by one person. The guys who used to really crank out the comics had a real assembly line working. They would have people doing the lettering and the inking and the coloring. Some of those manga guys who could do an incredible amount of comics had people who would imitate the style and they just had these whole teams of people. It was more like a movie studio. How long does it take to draw and letter and color a page? In this book I did them two pages at a time. So all the two-page spreads were done at once, and each of those would take probably four or five days of drawing and then another full day of coloring. So you’re looking at a workweek of each spread. But then there’s all kinds of retooling, redrawing and corrections, all kinds of complicated stuff that adds immense amounts of time to the process. Let’s talk about the Clowes universe in general. “Ghost World” still lives for a lot of us: Do you ever think about doing a sequel or a grownup version of that? For years I thought about what would that be, not necessarily that I would ever want to draw it. I just never came up with anything that felt like it needed to be done. I think they sort of deserve their own little life that goes on in people’s minds and not in reality. The only thing I’ve ever thought of doing with any of my characters again is to try to create some gigantic epic story that involved every character I’ve ever created in one big story. That’s what I’ll do as I’m like keeling over with a heart attack. I’ll be working on that. That’s a lot of characters at this point. It would be like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Or like those Marvel meets DC things. Right, where “The Avengers Meet the Justice League with Teen Titans.” You’d have to have Jim Belushi in there too, I think. I hope so. He’s part of the world. [Laughs] Where are you with movies these days? The “Wilson” movie will be coming out in the fall. It’s not quite all done but they’re putting the music on right now. Woody Harrelson is Wilson, with Laura Dern and Judy Greer and a bunch of other great actors. I wrote the screenplay for it. I was not involved in the production, but I’ve seen enough to make me think it’s going to be pretty good. I’m excited about it. And then beyond that I have nothing. I’m really comic-focused these days. The comics world just seems like it’s bigger and more prestigious every year. Do you still follow a lot of new work? I feel like it’s so big and fragmented that I feel lost a little bit. One of the great appeals to comics when I started was that you could know of every comic coming out, good or bad. I feel like I knew the name of every single working cartoonist in America. And now, every single day I learn about 50 more people I never heard of who are doing presentable comics. I can’t even grasp it. I count on friends who have really good taste, who find things and show them to me, and hope if anything’s really good that I need to see, it will ultimately come my way. Because I don’t have the wherewithal to figure out how to find stuff anymore. There’s so much to keep up with. Along with comics, underground and otherwise, there are more superhero movies all the time. You’ve been vocal about your frustration with superheroes. I am laughing at the fact that for years, when we were doing “Eightball” and “Hate” and “Love & Rockets” and stuff, we thought, “What we’re doing is really the mainstream stuff. It’s like comics for adults, that a general audience could read… and only the tiniest niche audience of emotional defectives care about superhero comics.” Superhero comics seemed to you like some old-world ’50s thing that was dying out. Right. And yet they’re dominating our industry. I remember an artist, Bob Burden, saying, “It’s so random. It would be like if all comics were about pilgrims and then we did comics about normal people and we were looked at as the weirdoes.” So that was our thesis, and then to see with the advent of technology where they could actually make these realistic superhero movies, to see that: No, the entire culture is what the comics shop was in 1985. It repudiates our lofty claims. It says more about our culture than anything else. I’m always kind of saddened when 45-year-old parents of my son’s friends can’t wait to go see “The Avengers.” That shouldn’t be for you. [Laughs] The sense that it’s a guilty pleasure or something for kids seems to have disappeared. That’s long gone. How much does that shift have to do with technology? I think there’s a certain chaos in the world and people need something that has very clear moral boundaries, I guess. I’ve taken my son to see a few of the superhero movies and I just find myself tuning out the minute it starts. It’s just not of any interest to me. I’ll leave the movie and a day later I’ll think, “Oh, we should go see that movie.” It’s like I can't even remember it. And he doesn’t even like them. That’s the thing, he’s sorta like, “Yeah, it was OK.” [Laughs] I think you and I and your son are an anomaly on this. There’s no doubt about it. I find it hilarious when normal people are talking about obscure Marvel characters like they always loved them. It’s like, No you didn’t. [Laughs] Acting as though they’d been dedicated fans their whole lives. Yeah, or just like, “Oh, that’s great, I love ‘Iron Man.’” It’s like, No you don’t. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s sort of become compulsory now, I guess. I guess.It feels strange to rave about someone who’s both self-effacing and the creator of so many self-loathing characters. But the comics artist Daniel Clowes is one of the masters of the genre. As cartoonists who draw people who don’t wear capes and tights have moved from the underground to literary respectability, Clowes -- an early forerunner -- has stayed in the game without losing his edge. And he’s been an important influence on younger cartoonists like Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson, who have built on Clowes’ originality, humor, innocence and dark alienation. It was those elements that made director Terry Zwigoff’s film adaptation of Clowes’ 1997 graphic novel “Ghost World” an instant classic (and featured an undiscovered Scarlett Johansson). The 2010 book “Wilson” will become a film this fall, directed by Craig Johnson and with Woody Harrelson playing the ornery title character. As engaging as those books may be, Clowes’ new one, “Patience,” is his first real page-turner and maybe his most emotionally direct story so far. The tale of a couple hit with tragedy, it involves time travel and complex backstories. “This is a fascinating collage, repurposing elements from action thrillers, psychological horror, and romantic drama,” the Publishers Weekly review says. “Clowes skillfully anchors each psychedelic turn in human emotion.” Salon spoke to Clowes from his home in Oakland, California; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Reading “Patience,” I was struck by how different it was from your other books. But I’m not sure there’s a typical Dan Clowes book. Does it feel like a departure to you, too? I always think, “This is unlike anything I’ve ever done!” And then it settles in and fits in, without my control. I’ll start at the most obvious place: Where did the idea for this come from? It was many things. The basic situation -- of the character kind of having to go into his recent past and retrace how things got the way they did -- was of great interest to me. It was just something that had been running through my mind. I had been putting together all my work for this museum monograph, so I was starting to see my life from this perspective that you get when you hit my age, where you see the specific days and moments where things veer off into a new direction. And I could kind of see the plot of my own life -- what were the plot points, what were the reversals, all those kinds of things that actually happen to us in less dramatic ways. That’s what set me off thinking this would hold my interest. In the beginning I’m just trying to find something that’s got that engine of interest that will regenerate itself every day. This has more of an engine than most. The plot keeps moving and twisting and changing every few pages. Does that make it more difficult for you? Your other books are more character-driven. Yeah, I’ve certainly submerged the plot in my other books. In several of them I want you to not think that there is a plot, that it’s just sort of unfolding as it is. With this one, I felt like with this kind of story, for the reader to actually get out of it what I was hoping they would, just the emotions and the connections to the characters and things, I knew that you had to have a plot that would not distract you. So I knew I had to work it out so well that it felt like you were in good hands, which was a challenge. It’s a very complicated story, and I wanted it to feel not so complicated. I can’t think of another book of yours that has this much time travel. No, I don’t think I’ve ever done any of that. Did you have a favorite comic book or TV show that you used as a model for the time travel, or did you just wing it? I was kind of winging it. As a kid there was a TV show called “The Time Tunnel” that I really just truly loved. It had the greatest time machine, which was this long, conical tunnel that had a spiral pattern inside, and they would walk into that tunnel and then appear in Nazi Germany. It was oddly not at all a science-fiction show, because these guys would then be in a historical setting. So it was more like a costume drama than a time-travel show. I don’t remember a second of any of the stories except that tunnel was so powerful to me; I love that idea. I really went out of my way to not look at any time travel stuff while I was working on this. Everybody was suggesting movies to me and there were all these books that would be in the periphery of my vision that felt like, “This is exactly the same as this book.” I felt like even if I did a book that was exactly like another book unwittingly, at least there would be these differences that would have to come out, and it would be somewhat clear that I hadn’t read that thing. So that was my hope. Now I feel like I can go back and watch “Looper” and stuff like that. There’s a lot of pain in the book, but it feels like there’s less making fun of people and mocking pop culture -- both things we’ve come to expect from you. Do you feel like you’ve said goodbye to that kind of cynicism? I haven’t said goodbye to anything. I’m always open to whatever comes along with each new book. I definitely didn’t feel like doing another sort of humor book. “Wilson” was more overtly funny to me and this one has humor around the edges, I think, but there’s nothing in it just designed to make you laugh. It does feel like it’s a lot different in tone. Was it depressing to work on, or did it have an exhilarating quality? It was the latter, for sure. When I started it, I had no idea it was going to be as long as it is. I was hoping to get it under 100 pages. If you had told me, “You’re gonna be working five years on a 180-page book,” I would have clearly predicted that at the end of that I would want to shoot myself and I would never want to see the book again. I would feel so burned out, I would have guessed. And the reality was I didn’t want to stop. I really still feel I’m in the world of the story even though I finished three or four months ago. Most people don’t understand just how long it takes to do a book like this. No, they don’t. Everyone’s like, “Oh, you doodle it. You do like a page in an hour or something.” It’s all color and almost 200 pages. Do you still hand-draw everything? Every single part of it is all done by hand by one person. The guys who used to really crank out the comics had a real assembly line working. They would have people doing the lettering and the inking and the coloring. Some of those manga guys who could do an incredible amount of comics had people who would imitate the style and they just had these whole teams of people. It was more like a movie studio. How long does it take to draw and letter and color a page? In this book I did them two pages at a time. So all the two-page spreads were done at once, and each of those would take probably four or five days of drawing and then another full day of coloring. So you’re looking at a workweek of each spread. But then there’s all kinds of retooling, redrawing and corrections, all kinds of complicated stuff that adds immense amounts of time to the process. Let’s talk about the Clowes universe in general. “Ghost World” still lives for a lot of us: Do you ever think about doing a sequel or a grownup version of that? For years I thought about what would that be, not necessarily that I would ever want to draw it. I just never came up with anything that felt like it needed to be done. I think they sort of deserve their own little life that goes on in people’s minds and not in reality. The only thing I’ve ever thought of doing with any of my characters again is to try to create some gigantic epic story that involved every character I’ve ever created in one big story. That’s what I’ll do as I’m like keeling over with a heart attack. I’ll be working on that. That’s a lot of characters at this point. It would be like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Or like those Marvel meets DC things. Right, where “The Avengers Meet the Justice League with Teen Titans.” You’d have to have Jim Belushi in there too, I think. I hope so. He’s part of the world. [Laughs] Where are you with movies these days? The “Wilson” movie will be coming out in the fall. It’s not quite all done but they’re putting the music on right now. Woody Harrelson is Wilson, with Laura Dern and Judy Greer and a bunch of other great actors. I wrote the screenplay for it. I was not involved in the production, but I’ve seen enough to make me think it’s going to be pretty good. I’m excited about it. And then beyond that I have nothing. I’m really comic-focused these days. The comics world just seems like it’s bigger and more prestigious every year. Do you still follow a lot of new work? I feel like it’s so big and fragmented that I feel lost a little bit. One of the great appeals to comics when I started was that you could know of every comic coming out, good or bad. I feel like I knew the name of every single working cartoonist in America. And now, every single day I learn about 50 more people I never heard of who are doing presentable comics. I can’t even grasp it. I count on friends who have really good taste, who find things and show them to me, and hope if anything’s really good that I need to see, it will ultimately come my way. Because I don’t have the wherewithal to figure out how to find stuff anymore. There’s so much to keep up with. Along with comics, underground and otherwise, there are more superhero movies all the time. You’ve been vocal about your frustration with superheroes. I am laughing at the fact that for years, when we were doing “Eightball” and “Hate” and “Love & Rockets” and stuff, we thought, “What we’re doing is really the mainstream stuff. It’s like comics for adults, that a general audience could read… and only the tiniest niche audience of emotional defectives care about superhero comics.” Superhero comics seemed to you like some old-world ’50s thing that was dying out. Right. And yet they’re dominating our industry. I remember an artist, Bob Burden, saying, “It’s so random. It would be like if all comics were about pilgrims and then we did comics about normal people and we were looked at as the weirdoes.” So that was our thesis, and then to see with the advent of technology where they could actually make these realistic superhero movies, to see that: No, the entire culture is what the comics shop was in 1985. It repudiates our lofty claims. It says more about our culture than anything else. I’m always kind of saddened when 45-year-old parents of my son’s friends can’t wait to go see “The Avengers.” That shouldn’t be for you. [Laughs] The sense that it’s a guilty pleasure or something for kids seems to have disappeared. That’s long gone. How much does that shift have to do with technology? I think there’s a certain chaos in the world and people need something that has very clear moral boundaries, I guess. I’ve taken my son to see a few of the superhero movies and I just find myself tuning out the minute it starts. It’s just not of any interest to me. I’ll leave the movie and a day later I’ll think, “Oh, we should go see that movie.” It’s like I can't even remember it. And he doesn’t even like them. That’s the thing, he’s sorta like, “Yeah, it was OK.” [Laughs] I think you and I and your son are an anomaly on this. There’s no doubt about it. I find it hilarious when normal people are talking about obscure Marvel characters like they always loved them. It’s like, No you didn’t. [Laughs] Acting as though they’d been dedicated fans their whole lives. Yeah, or just like, “Oh, that’s great, I love ‘Iron Man.’” It’s like, No you don’t. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s sort of become compulsory now, I guess. I guess.It feels strange to rave about someone who’s both self-effacing and the creator of so many self-loathing characters. But the comics artist Daniel Clowes is one of the masters of the genre. As cartoonists who draw people who don’t wear capes and tights have moved from the underground to literary respectability, Clowes -- an early forerunner -- has stayed in the game without losing his edge. And he’s been an important influence on younger cartoonists like Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson, who have built on Clowes’ originality, humor, innocence and dark alienation. It was those elements that made director Terry Zwigoff’s film adaptation of Clowes’ 1997 graphic novel “Ghost World” an instant classic (and featured an undiscovered Scarlett Johansson). The 2010 book “Wilson” will become a film this fall, directed by Craig Johnson and with Woody Harrelson playing the ornery title character. As engaging as those books may be, Clowes’ new one, “Patience,” is his first real page-turner and maybe his most emotionally direct story so far. The tale of a couple hit with tragedy, it involves time travel and complex backstories. “This is a fascinating collage, repurposing elements from action thrillers, psychological horror, and romantic drama,” the Publishers Weekly review says. “Clowes skillfully anchors each psychedelic turn in human emotion.” Salon spoke to Clowes from his home in Oakland, California; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Reading “Patience,” I was struck by how different it was from your other books. But I’m not sure there’s a typical Dan Clowes book. Does it feel like a departure to you, too? I always think, “This is unlike anything I’ve ever done!” And then it settles in and fits in, without my control. I’ll start at the most obvious place: Where did the idea for this come from? It was many things. The basic situation -- of the character kind of having to go into his recent past and retrace how things got the way they did -- was of great interest to me. It was just something that had been running through my mind. I had been putting together all my work for this museum monograph, so I was starting to see my life from this perspective that you get when you hit my age, where you see the specific days and moments where things veer off into a new direction. And I could kind of see the plot of my own life -- what were the plot points, what were the reversals, all those kinds of things that actually happen to us in less dramatic ways. That’s what set me off thinking this would hold my interest. In the beginning I’m just trying to find something that’s got that engine of interest that will regenerate itself every day. This has more of an engine than most. The plot keeps moving and twisting and changing every few pages. Does that make it more difficult for you? Your other books are more character-driven. Yeah, I’ve certainly submerged the plot in my other books. In several of them I want you to not think that there is a plot, that it’s just sort of unfolding as it is. With this one, I felt like with this kind of story, for the reader to actually get out of it what I was hoping they would, just the emotions and the connections to the characters and things, I knew that you had to have a plot that would not distract you. So I knew I had to work it out so well that it felt like you were in good hands, which was a challenge. It’s a very complicated story, and I wanted it to feel not so complicated. I can’t think of another book of yours that has this much time travel. No, I don’t think I’ve ever done any of that. Did you have a favorite comic book or TV show that you used as a model for the time travel, or did you just wing it? I was kind of winging it. As a kid there was a TV show called “The Time Tunnel” that I really just truly loved. It had the greatest time machine, which was this long, conical tunnel that had a spiral pattern inside, and they would walk into that tunnel and then appear in Nazi Germany. It was oddly not at all a science-fiction show, because these guys would then be in a historical setting. So it was more like a costume drama than a time-travel show. I don’t remember a second of any of the stories except that tunnel was so powerful to me; I love that idea. I really went out of my way to not look at any time travel stuff while I was working on this. Everybody was suggesting movies to me and there were all these books that would be in the periphery of my vision that felt like, “This is exactly the same as this book.” I felt like even if I did a book that was exactly like another book unwittingly, at least there would be these differences that would have to come out, and it would be somewhat clear that I hadn’t read that thing. So that was my hope. Now I feel like I can go back and watch “Looper” and stuff like that. There’s a lot of pain in the book, but it feels like there’s less making fun of people and mocking pop culture -- both things we’ve come to expect from you. Do you feel like you’ve said goodbye to that kind of cynicism? I haven’t said goodbye to anything. I’m always open to whatever comes along with each new book. I definitely didn’t feel like doing another sort of humor book. “Wilson” was more overtly funny to me and this one has humor around the edges, I think, but there’s nothing in it just designed to make you laugh. It does feel like it’s a lot different in tone. Was it depressing to work on, or did it have an exhilarating quality? It was the latter, for sure. When I started it, I had no idea it was going to be as long as it is. I was hoping to get it under 100 pages. If you had told me, “You’re gonna be working five years on a 180-page book,” I would have clearly predicted that at the end of that I would want to shoot myself and I would never want to see the book again. I would feel so burned out, I would have guessed. And the reality was I didn’t want to stop. I really still feel I’m in the world of the story even though I finished three or four months ago. Most people don’t understand just how long it takes to do a book like this. No, they don’t. Everyone’s like, “Oh, you doodle it. You do like a page in an hour or something.” It’s all color and almost 200 pages. Do you still hand-draw everything? Every single part of it is all done by hand by one person. The guys who used to really crank out the comics had a real assembly line working. They would have people doing the lettering and the inking and the coloring. Some of those manga guys who could do an incredible amount of comics had people who would imitate the style and they just had these whole teams of people. It was more like a movie studio. How long does it take to draw and letter and color a page? In this book I did them two pages at a time. So all the two-page spreads were done at once, and each of those would take probably four or five days of drawing and then another full day of coloring. So you’re looking at a workweek of each spread. But then there’s all kinds of retooling, redrawing and corrections, all kinds of complicated stuff that adds immense amounts of time to the process. Let’s talk about the Clowes universe in general. “Ghost World” still lives for a lot of us: Do you ever think about doing a sequel or a grownup version of that? For years I thought about what would that be, not necessarily that I would ever want to draw it. I just never came up with anything that felt like it needed to be done. I think they sort of deserve their own little life that goes on in people’s minds and not in reality. The only thing I’ve ever thought of doing with any of my characters again is to try to create some gigantic epic story that involved every character I’ve ever created in one big story. That’s what I’ll do as I’m like keeling over with a heart attack. I’ll be working on that. That’s a lot of characters at this point. It would be like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Or like those Marvel meets DC things. Right, where “The Avengers Meet the Justice League with Teen Titans.” You’d have to have Jim Belushi in there too, I think. I hope so. He’s part of the world. [Laughs] Where are you with movies these days? The “Wilson” movie will be coming out in the fall. It’s not quite all done but they’re putting the music on right now. Woody Harrelson is Wilson, with Laura Dern and Judy Greer and a bunch of other great actors. I wrote the screenplay for it. I was not involved in the production, but I’ve seen enough to make me think it’s going to be pretty good. I’m excited about it. And then beyond that I have nothing. I’m really comic-focused these days. The comics world just seems like it’s bigger and more prestigious every year. Do you still follow a lot of new work? I feel like it’s so big and fragmented that I feel lost a little bit. One of the great appeals to comics when I started was that you could know of every comic coming out, good or bad. I feel like I knew the name of every single working cartoonist in America. And now, every single day I learn about 50 more people I never heard of who are doing presentable comics. I can’t even grasp it. I count on friends who have really good taste, who find things and show them to me, and hope if anything’s really good that I need to see, it will ultimately come my way. Because I don’t have the wherewithal to figure out how to find stuff anymore. There’s so much to keep up with. Along with comics, underground and otherwise, there are more superhero movies all the time. You’ve been vocal about your frustration with superheroes. I am laughing at the fact that for years, when we were doing “Eightball” and “Hate” and “Love & Rockets” and stuff, we thought, “What we’re doing is really the mainstream stuff. It’s like comics for adults, that a general audience could read… and only the tiniest niche audience of emotional defectives care about superhero comics.” Superhero comics seemed to you like some old-world ’50s thing that was dying out. Right. And yet they’re dominating our industry. I remember an artist, Bob Burden, saying, “It’s so random. It would be like if all comics were about pilgrims and then we did comics about normal people and we were looked at as the weirdoes.” So that was our thesis, and then to see with the advent of technology where they could actually make these realistic superhero movies, to see that: No, the entire culture is what the comics shop was in 1985. It repudiates our lofty claims. It says more about our culture than anything else. I’m always kind of saddened when 45-year-old parents of my son’s friends can’t wait to go see “The Avengers.” That shouldn’t be for you. [Laughs] The sense that it’s a guilty pleasure or something for kids seems to have disappeared. That’s long gone. How much does that shift have to do with technology? I think there’s a certain chaos in the world and people need something that has very clear moral boundaries, I guess. I’ve taken my son to see a few of the superhero movies and I just find myself tuning out the minute it starts. It’s just not of any interest to me. I’ll leave the movie and a day later I’ll think, “Oh, we should go see that movie.” It’s like I can't even remember it. And he doesn’t even like them. That’s the thing, he’s sorta like, “Yeah, it was OK.” [Laughs] I think you and I and your son are an anomaly on this. There’s no doubt about it. I find it hilarious when normal people are talking about obscure Marvel characters like they always loved them. It’s like, No you didn’t. [Laughs] Acting as though they’d been dedicated fans their whole lives. Yeah, or just like, “Oh, that’s great, I love ‘Iron Man.’” It’s like, No you don’t. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s sort of become compulsory now, I guess. I guess.

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“Well, that’s the big mystery about God”: It’s amazing what a 4-year-old who’s given the opportunity to speak freely in preschool can come up with

It’s preschool application season, a selection process so brutal in some parts of the country that it can make the college admissions game look like a round of Candyland: Will my child be offered a spot? Can we afford the fees? Is this a good education? In the troika of preschool concerns, access and affordability directly affect parents’ lives while the elusive concept of “quality” is mainly felt by the children themselves. Studies show that parents often miss many of the scientifically validated preschool measures linked to social-emotional and academic success, one of the most important of which involves the use of spoken language we hear in the classroom. Conversation is central to children’s cognitive and emotional development, but too often in preschool classrooms, kids are asked questions with predetermined answers, doled out in calibrated doses by the teacher. What gets in the way of giving young children a real voice? Children have always learned from talking and listening to peers, and we’ve known for decades that children in language-rich preschool classrooms – where kids have long stretches of time for active play and conversation – ultimately do better academically than preschoolers who are taught primarily by scripted "letter-of-the-week" methods focusing on alphabet and vocabulary recall. We know, too, that children learn impulse control and other key self-regulation skills through the natural give-and-take of play. Listen to young children building a space station, as I recently did in a Pittsburgh kindergarten, and you’ll hear them grappling with deep and difficult questions: “Even though he was already dead, I think Jesus probably made the white dwarf stars and the red giants,” a 4-year-old gravely informed a friend. “So, who made all the new planets and everything?” his interlocutor responded. “Well, that’s the big mystery about God,” the little boy replied. It certainly is. This young child pondering the imponderable hadn’t spoken a word of English only a year previously, yet he had found a way to engage in conversation that really mattered. Unfortunately, too many children miss these precious learning opportunities because adults are cued from years of conditioning to see preschool “quality” in materials, not human connections –materials that are as luridly colored and adorable as possible. We view packed schedules, hokey craft projects, and curriculum themes based on seasons or food groups as a sign that learning must be going on. Adults ought to be asking if children have the chance to talk, to know and to influence one another. Are children encouraged to wrestle with ideas, put them into words, and listen mindfully to their peers? Are they encouraged to make their learning visible, to think out loud, to be heard and not merely seen? To put this more directly: Do you see signs of laughter, spontaneity, joy and affection in the classroom? Do you see teachers on the floor with children, seeing things at their level? Can a child go off-script, tell a meandering story, opt out of a planned activity to talk about something that captivates her? Can children respond to distress in themselves and others? It’s become fashionable in some educational quarters to assume that rich conversational environments can only be the province of, well, rich children. But the reverse is really the case: We know that children in poverty and children of color are twice as likely to be in preschool classrooms rated “low quality” where natural and abundant conversation is limited. Children at risk for school failure, including those from families where English is not spoken at home, are the ones who need exposure to language-rich (rather than just “print-rich”) classrooms the most. If they’re not getting it, surely that is a workforce problem, not a problem with the children themselves. I believe there may be a link between preschool classroom environment and the ability to engage in productive dialogue in the later years. The exercise of free expression, as a cultural and pedagogic value, depends on the right not only to speak but to listen. This ability to listen comes, I believe, from sustained practice; it’s a habit of mind that, like any other habit, can be cultivated or allowed to lie fallow. Unfortunately, our current early childhood environments rarely allow children sufficient practice engaging in the serve-and-response of good dialogue. The truth is that many educational environments aren't at all conducive to hearing what students are saying. Whether it’s an absence of effective bilingual teachers or a reliance on dated pedagogy, or general discomfort with children talking about serious topics such as death and God, it’s not always easy to hear the voices of our littlest students. We educators are forever looking for the next educational work-around to produce the outcomes we want. We produce an endless stream of checklists and worksheets, trainings and standards. But there are no shortcuts to deep learning; there is no substitute for dialogue. If we want high-quality early learning environments, where children can grow up to solve society’s problems, we need to shift our gaze from all the stuff in the classroom to the words of the little persons in it.It’s preschool application season, a selection process so brutal in some parts of the country that it can make the college admissions game look like a round of Candyland: Will my child be offered a spot? Can we afford the fees? Is this a good education? In the troika of preschool concerns, access and affordability directly affect parents’ lives while the elusive concept of “quality” is mainly felt by the children themselves. Studies show that parents often miss many of the scientifically validated preschool measures linked to social-emotional and academic success, one of the most important of which involves the use of spoken language we hear in the classroom. Conversation is central to children’s cognitive and emotional development, but too often in preschool classrooms, kids are asked questions with predetermined answers, doled out in calibrated doses by the teacher. What gets in the way of giving young children a real voice? Children have always learned from talking and listening to peers, and we’ve known for decades that children in language-rich preschool classrooms – where kids have long stretches of time for active play and conversation – ultimately do better academically than preschoolers who are taught primarily by scripted "letter-of-the-week" methods focusing on alphabet and vocabulary recall. We know, too, that children learn impulse control and other key self-regulation skills through the natural give-and-take of play. Listen to young children building a space station, as I recently did in a Pittsburgh kindergarten, and you’ll hear them grappling with deep and difficult questions: “Even though he was already dead, I think Jesus probably made the white dwarf stars and the red giants,” a 4-year-old gravely informed a friend. “So, who made all the new planets and everything?” his interlocutor responded. “Well, that’s the big mystery about God,” the little boy replied. It certainly is. This young child pondering the imponderable hadn’t spoken a word of English only a year previously, yet he had found a way to engage in conversation that really mattered. Unfortunately, too many children miss these precious learning opportunities because adults are cued from years of conditioning to see preschool “quality” in materials, not human connections –materials that are as luridly colored and adorable as possible. We view packed schedules, hokey craft projects, and curriculum themes based on seasons or food groups as a sign that learning must be going on. Adults ought to be asking if children have the chance to talk, to know and to influence one another. Are children encouraged to wrestle with ideas, put them into words, and listen mindfully to their peers? Are they encouraged to make their learning visible, to think out loud, to be heard and not merely seen? To put this more directly: Do you see signs of laughter, spontaneity, joy and affection in the classroom? Do you see teachers on the floor with children, seeing things at their level? Can a child go off-script, tell a meandering story, opt out of a planned activity to talk about something that captivates her? Can children respond to distress in themselves and others? It’s become fashionable in some educational quarters to assume that rich conversational environments can only be the province of, well, rich children. But the reverse is really the case: We know that children in poverty and children of color are twice as likely to be in preschool classrooms rated “low quality” where natural and abundant conversation is limited. Children at risk for school failure, including those from families where English is not spoken at home, are the ones who need exposure to language-rich (rather than just “print-rich”) classrooms the most. If they’re not getting it, surely that is a workforce problem, not a problem with the children themselves. I believe there may be a link between preschool classroom environment and the ability to engage in productive dialogue in the later years. The exercise of free expression, as a cultural and pedagogic value, depends on the right not only to speak but to listen. This ability to listen comes, I believe, from sustained practice; it’s a habit of mind that, like any other habit, can be cultivated or allowed to lie fallow. Unfortunately, our current early childhood environments rarely allow children sufficient practice engaging in the serve-and-response of good dialogue. The truth is that many educational environments aren't at all conducive to hearing what students are saying. Whether it’s an absence of effective bilingual teachers or a reliance on dated pedagogy, or general discomfort with children talking about serious topics such as death and God, it’s not always easy to hear the voices of our littlest students. We educators are forever looking for the next educational work-around to produce the outcomes we want. We produce an endless stream of checklists and worksheets, trainings and standards. But there are no shortcuts to deep learning; there is no substitute for dialogue. If we want high-quality early learning environments, where children can grow up to solve society’s problems, we need to shift our gaze from all the stuff in the classroom to the words of the little persons in it.

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The right’s pathetic blame game: Now it’s the left-wing media’s fault Trump is winning

Following CNN's Republican Party primary debate last week, the conservative site NewsBusters, which exists to bash the press for its supposed liberal bias, quickly published a piece focusing on the debate moderators' prime-time performance. No doubt NewsBusters was furious with CNN, right? Recall that last November, following a raucous Republican debate hosted by CNBC, Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell released a scathing critique of the moderators, insisting they were dripping with contempt for the GOP candidates and trying to throw the election to the Democrats. (Bozell's group publishes NewsBusters.) So what was the collective sin of the CNN moderators last week? According to NewsBusters, they had failed to press Donald Trump for a response regarding documented claims that a reporter had been manhandled by Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, at a public event. NewsBusters was also upset that the alleged assault had received minimal time on the network evening newscasts: "The main broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC largely remained silent on Lewandowski's alleged actions toward a female reporter until Thursday." Wait, what? It's true: Following a Republican debate, the conservative NewsBusters pointed out that the media wasn't paying sufficient attention to a news story that reflected poorly on the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And with that, we're officially through the looking glass, to the point where conservative critiques of the campaign press now read like Media Matters essays: Journalists are too soft on Trump, rewarding him with too much airtime and allowing him to dictate access ground rules. Does a lot of that sound familiar? This Trump campaign has produced all kinds of regrettable firsts this season (regular outbursts of violence at rallies, for starters). But one of the strangest twists has to be the fact that some conservatives who have spent generations denouncing the press for being unfairly critical of Republicans have now completely flipped the script. Grasping at conspiratorial straws in an effort to explain away Trump's control over Republican voters and the media's apparently soft treatment of a prominent Republican politician, conservatives remain convinced the "liberal media" is still out to get the GOP. Only this time, the press is torpedoing Republicans by ... being too nice to the Republican front-runner. Convinced that Trump is not a true conservative and that he's a surefire loser in November, more and more conservative commentators are desperate to derail his nomination. So they're demanding pundits and reporters sharpen their knives when covering the Republican front-runner; that they tell The Truth about Trump and reveal him for the phony they insist he really is. NewsBusters has also objected to networks not covering news that the Trump campaign had given press credentials to a prominent white supremacist and underplaying the controversy over Trump University. There's obviously deep irony in these newfound complaints. It was just five months ago that the conservative media revolted against CNBC for hosting its allegedly biased Republican debate. Beating the "liberal media bias" drums quite loudly, critics pounced on the network because moderators were unfair to the candidates, including Trump. So it's a bit disingenuous to now blame that same press simply because lots of Republican supporters are suddenly freaking out about Trump's likely nomination. Meaning, conservatives can't just unring the "liberal media bias" bell. Republican-friendly critics have told the press, in no uncertain terms, that when it comes to presidential campaigns, lay off our guy -- or else. (Because of the CNBC fracas, the Republican Party

Cranks, zealots, extremists: How the paranoid style of Trump, Cruz and Palin took over the GOP and infected America

One day before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Richard Hofstadter was in London, delivering a lecture that a year later would appear in Harper’s as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” At 47 years of age, Hofstadter was an American brand. He held an endowed chair at Columbia University—not to mention two Pulitzers. He was considered to be one of the finest historians and public intellectuals of his time. Right-wing putschists led by Barry Goldwater (and the evidently immortal Phyllis Schlafly) had seized control of the Republican Party, muscling aside Nelson Rockefeller and the moderate wing he represented. Hofstadter was alarmed. “The Paranoid Style” was his red flag. In the introduction to a 2007 Vintage Books collection of Hofstadter’s political writing, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz describes the 1964 essay as “a study of political cranks and zealots” in which the author described “a chronic, rancid syndrome in our political life.” Indigenous and deeply rooted in American history, the paranoid politics Hofstadter described began with a panic among Federalists, echoed in New England’s pulpits in 1789, when preachers warned of the Bavarian Illuminati plots to undermine the new republic. In the 1820s and 1830s the nation was seized with a fear of Masons, who were perceived to be a threat to republican government because Masonry was a secret society with its own system of loyalty and its own jurisdictions. Public hysteria about Masonic plots was followed by an anti-Catholic movement focused on the Society of Jesus, better known as Jesuits. “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritans,” Hofstadter wrote. All of this is understandable in a young nation defining itself and defending itself from external and internal threats. It’s when Hofstadter takes what he describes as the long jump to the contemporary right wing that the paranoid style of politics he describes speaks to our current political moment. It doesn’t take much more of a leap to conclude that the same rancid syndrome, which Hofstadter chronicled as occurring in episodic waves in American political life, is upon us today, and the political cranks and zealots are Republican voters animated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. In the sixties, the country hadn’t entirely moved beyond McCarthyism, and the fear that the highest levels of the federal government had been infiltrated by communists who were selling out U.S. national interests. That particular obsession is largely a relic of the past, perhaps with the exception of religious loons such as Pat Robertson, and Rev. Rafael Cruz (father of Ted), who has referred to Barack Obama as a socialist aligned with Cuba’s Castro brothers. Read “The Paranoid Style”—eliding the references to the communist menace—and you’ll discover an insightful analysis of the overheated rhetoric and reckless posturing that is the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Hofstadter quoted Harvard professor Daniel Bell’s description of “the modern right wing” of the 1960s. If Bell’s description weren’t so articulate, it could be passed off as briefing notes for Sarah Palin’s speechwriter.

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind; though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; capitalism has been gradually undermined . . . the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen at the very centers of American power.

The “modern right wing” of 2016? You can find it at a Trump rally in a Birmingham stadium or a Cruz caucus in Iowa—even with Palin on the hustings in New Hampshire—promising to take back our country from the intellectual elites who have dispossessed “real Americans.” Like today’s Republican presidential candidates, Hofstadter’s paranoids opposed the income tax and worked to repeal it. They were anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan. They had a deep-seated aversion to “the democracies of Western Europe.” They harbored a “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” They envisioned the enemy eroding our values and undermining our national security: “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.” Throw in “African-American”—which was beyond even the most febrile delusions of the hysterical conservatives of the 1960s— and you’ve almost got Rev. Raphael Cruz’s description of the sybaritic, foreign-born Muslim pretender to the American presidency. How close are we to Yogi Berra’s “déjà vu all over again?” Hofstadter’s essay quoted a New York Times story about conspiracy theorists who warned of a covert collaboration between the Department of Defense and the United Nations:

A United States Army guerrilla warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is actually a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over our country.

At the time, only one inconsequential three-term Congressman from Orange County, California, bought into the alleged plot that had President Kennedy dismantling the U.S. military and replacing it with a U.N. peacekeeping force. Last summer, when a group of “patriots” in the small Texas town of Bastrop claimed that a routine training operation conducted by the U.S. Army was a covert U.N. mission, and that U.N. vans had been filmed in Walmart parking lots, Governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas Guard to monitor the operation. As senator, Cruz directed his staff to begin an inquiry at the Pentagon. Abbott recently travelled to Israel and Switzerland, and he has drafted a revised U.S. Constitution, which he intends to bring before a Constitutional Convention. He’s obviously positioning himself for something larger than elected office in Texas. Cruz, meanwhile, has a reasonable shot at his party’s presidential nomination. And Palin is back, sounding the alarm about the “leftists in Washington destroying our military.” “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content,” Hofstadter wrote. “I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.” If political rhetoric is any measure of the moment, a short excerpt of the speech Sarah Palin delivered when she endorsed Donald Trump on January 19 illustrates how far around the bend the extremists in the modern Republican Party have gone.

Tell me, is this conservative? GOP majorities handing over a blank check to fund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood and illegal immigration that competes for your jobs, and turning safety nets into hammocks, and all these new Democrat voters that are going to be coming on over border as we keep the borders open, and bequeathing our children millions in new debt, and refusing to fight back for our solvency, and our sovereignty, even though that’s why we elected them and sent them as a majority to D.C. No! If they’re not willing to do that, then how are they to tell us that we’re not conservative enough in order to be able to make these changes in America that we know need to be . . . Now they’re concerned about this ideological purity? Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh tell somebody like, Phyllis Schlafly, she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter. Tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough?

Palin might be considered a marginal figure by sensible moderates in both parties. But she’s revered on the far right, and in the 200 words above she addresses most of the paranoid fears of today’s right: a treasonous government selling out our sovereignty, coming after our guns, eroding religious rights, inviting aliens into the country to take our jobs, treating the Constitution with contempt. Palin managed to include in one over-the top speech most of what animates today’s Republican right wing—a constituency of “political cranks and zealots” who have moved far beyond the extremists Hofstadter described in an essay written half a century ago. This story was first published by the Washington Spectator One day before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Richard Hofstadter was in London, delivering a lecture that a year later would appear in Harper’s as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” At 47 years of age, Hofstadter was an American brand. He held an endowed chair at Columbia University—not to mention two Pulitzers. He was considered to be one of the finest historians and public intellectuals of his time. Right-wing putschists led by Barry Goldwater (and the evidently immortal Phyllis Schlafly) had seized control of the Republican Party, muscling aside Nelson Rockefeller and the moderate wing he represented. Hofstadter was alarmed. “The Paranoid Style” was his red flag. In the introduction to a 2007 Vintage Books collection of Hofstadter’s political writing, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz describes the 1964 essay as “a study of political cranks and zealots” in which the author described “a chronic, rancid syndrome in our political life.” Indigenous and deeply rooted in American history, the paranoid politics Hofstadter described began with a panic among Federalists, echoed in New England’s pulpits in 1789, when preachers warned of the Bavarian Illuminati plots to undermine the new republic. In the 1820s and 1830s the nation was seized with a fear of Masons, who were perceived to be a threat to republican government because Masonry was a secret society with its own system of loyalty and its own jurisdictions. Public hysteria about Masonic plots was followed by an anti-Catholic movement focused on the Society of Jesus, better known as Jesuits. “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritans,” Hofstadter wrote. All of this is understandable in a young nation defining itself and defending itself from external and internal threats. It’s when Hofstadter takes what he describes as the long jump to the contemporary right wing that the paranoid style of politics he describes speaks to our current political moment. It doesn’t take much more of a leap to conclude that the same rancid syndrome, which Hofstadter chronicled as occurring in episodic waves in American political life, is upon us today, and the political cranks and zealots are Republican voters animated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. In the sixties, the country hadn’t entirely moved beyond McCarthyism, and the fear that the highest levels of the federal government had been infiltrated by communists who were selling out U.S. national interests. That particular obsession is largely a relic of the past, perhaps with the exception of religious loons such as Pat Robertson, and Rev. Rafael Cruz (father of Ted), who has referred to Barack Obama as a socialist aligned with Cuba’s Castro brothers. Read “The Paranoid Style”—eliding the references to the communist menace—and you’ll discover an insightful analysis of the overheated rhetoric and reckless posturing that is the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Hofstadter quoted Harvard professor Daniel Bell’s description of “the modern right wing” of the 1960s. If Bell’s description weren’t so articulate, it could be passed off as briefing notes for Sarah Palin’s speechwriter.

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind; though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; capitalism has been gradually undermined . . . the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen at the very centers of American power.

The “modern right wing” of 2016? You can find it at a Trump rally in a Birmingham stadium or a Cruz caucus in Iowa—even with Palin on the hustings in New Hampshire—promising to take back our country from the intellectual elites who have dispossessed “real Americans.” Like today’s Republican presidential candidates, Hofstadter’s paranoids opposed the income tax and worked to repeal it. They were anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan. They had a deep-seated aversion to “the democracies of Western Europe.” They harbored a “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” They envisioned the enemy eroding our values and undermining our national security: “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.” Throw in “African-American”—which was beyond even the most febrile delusions of the hysterical conservatives of the 1960s— and you’ve almost got Rev. Raphael Cruz’s description of the sybaritic, foreign-born Muslim pretender to the American presidency. How close are we to Yogi Berra’s “déjà vu all over again?” Hofstadter’s essay quoted a New York Times story about conspiracy theorists who warned of a covert collaboration between the Department of Defense and the United Nations:

A United States Army guerrilla warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is actually a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over our country.

At the time, only one inconsequential three-term Congressman from Orange County, California, bought into the alleged plot that had President Kennedy dismantling the U.S. military and replacing it with a U.N. peacekeeping force. Last summer, when a group of “patriots” in the small Texas town of Bastrop claimed that a routine training operation conducted by the U.S. Army was a covert U.N. mission, and that U.N. vans had been filmed in Walmart parking lots, Governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas Guard to monitor the operation. As senator, Cruz directed his staff to begin an inquiry at the Pentagon. Abbott recently travelled to Israel and Switzerland, and he has drafted a revised U.S. Constitution, which he intends to bring before a Constitutional Convention. He’s obviously positioning himself for something larger than elected office in Texas. Cruz, meanwhile, has a reasonable shot at his party’s presidential nomination. And Palin is back, sounding the alarm about the “leftists in Washington destroying our military.” “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content,” Hofstadter wrote. “I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.” If political rhetoric is any measure of the moment, a short excerpt of the speech Sarah Palin delivered when she endorsed Donald Trump on January 19 illustrates how far around the bend the extremists in the modern Republican Party have gone.

Tell me, is this conservative? GOP majorities handing over a blank check to fund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood and illegal immigration that competes for your jobs, and turning safety nets into hammocks, and all these new Democrat voters that are going to be coming on over border as we keep the borders open, and bequeathing our children millions in new debt, and refusing to fight back for our solvency, and our sovereignty, even though that’s why we elected them and sent them as a majority to D.C. No! If they’re not willing to do that, then how are they to tell us that we’re not conservative enough in order to be able to make these changes in America that we know need to be . . . Now they’re concerned about this ideological purity? Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh tell somebody like, Phyllis Schlafly, she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter. Tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough?

Palin might be considered a marginal figure by sensible moderates in both parties. But she’s revered on the far right, and in the 200 words above she addresses most of the paranoid fears of today’s right: a treasonous government selling out our sovereignty, coming after our guns, eroding religious rights, inviting aliens into the country to take our jobs, treating the Constitution with contempt. Palin managed to include in one over-the top speech most of what animates today’s Republican right wing—a constituency of “political cranks and zealots” who have moved far beyond the extremists Hofstadter described in an essay written half a century ago. This story was first published by the Washington Spectator One day before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Richard Hofstadter was in London, delivering a lecture that a year later would appear in Harper’s as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” At 47 years of age, Hofstadter was an American brand. He held an endowed chair at Columbia University—not to mention two Pulitzers. He was considered to be one of the finest historians and public intellectuals of his time. Right-wing putschists led by Barry Goldwater (and the evidently immortal Phyllis Schlafly) had seized control of the Republican Party, muscling aside Nelson Rockefeller and the moderate wing he represented. Hofstadter was alarmed. “The Paranoid Style” was his red flag. In the introduction to a 2007 Vintage Books collection of Hofstadter’s political writing, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz describes the 1964 essay as “a study of political cranks and zealots” in which the author described “a chronic, rancid syndrome in our political life.” Indigenous and deeply rooted in American history, the paranoid politics Hofstadter described began with a panic among Federalists, echoed in New England’s pulpits in 1789, when preachers warned of the Bavarian Illuminati plots to undermine the new republic. In the 1820s and 1830s the nation was seized with a fear of Masons, who were perceived to be a threat to republican government because Masonry was a secret society with its own system of loyalty and its own jurisdictions. Public hysteria about Masonic plots was followed by an anti-Catholic movement focused on the Society of Jesus, better known as Jesuits. “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritans,” Hofstadter wrote. All of this is understandable in a young nation defining itself and defending itself from external and internal threats. It’s when Hofstadter takes what he describes as the long jump to the contemporary right wing that the paranoid style of politics he describes speaks to our current political moment. It doesn’t take much more of a leap to conclude that the same rancid syndrome, which Hofstadter chronicled as occurring in episodic waves in American political life, is upon us today, and the political cranks and zealots are Republican voters animated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. In the sixties, the country hadn’t entirely moved beyond McCarthyism, and the fear that the highest levels of the federal government had been infiltrated by communists who were selling out U.S. national interests. That particular obsession is largely a relic of the past, perhaps with the exception of religious loons such as Pat Robertson, and Rev. Rafael Cruz (father of Ted), who has referred to Barack Obama as a socialist aligned with Cuba’s Castro brothers. Read “The Paranoid Style”—eliding the references to the communist menace—and you’ll discover an insightful analysis of the overheated rhetoric and reckless posturing that is the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Hofstadter quoted Harvard professor Daniel Bell’s description of “the modern right wing” of the 1960s. If Bell’s description weren’t so articulate, it could be passed off as briefing notes for Sarah Palin’s speechwriter.

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind; though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; capitalism has been gradually undermined . . . the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen at the very centers of American power.

The “modern right wing” of 2016? You can find it at a Trump rally in a Birmingham stadium or a Cruz caucus in Iowa—even with Palin on the hustings in New Hampshire—promising to take back our country from the intellectual elites who have dispossessed “real Americans.” Like today’s Republican presidential candidates, Hofstadter’s paranoids opposed the income tax and worked to repeal it. They were anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan. They had a deep-seated aversion to “the democracies of Western Europe.” They harbored a “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” They envisioned the enemy eroding our values and undermining our national security: “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.” Throw in “African-American”—which was beyond even the most febrile delusions of the hysterical conservatives of the 1960s— and you’ve almost got Rev. Raphael Cruz’s description of the sybaritic, foreign-born Muslim pretender to the American presidency. How close are we to Yogi Berra’s “déjà vu all over again?” Hofstadter’s essay quoted a New York Times story about conspiracy theorists who warned of a covert collaboration between the Department of Defense and the United Nations:

A United States Army guerrilla warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is actually a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over our country.

At the time, only one inconsequential three-term Congressman from Orange County, California, bought into the alleged plot that had President Kennedy dismantling the U.S. military and replacing it with a U.N. peacekeeping force. Last summer, when a group of “patriots” in the small Texas town of Bastrop claimed that a routine training operation conducted by the U.S. Army was a covert U.N. mission, and that U.N. vans had been filmed in Walmart parking lots, Governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas Guard to monitor the operation. As senator, Cruz directed his staff to begin an inquiry at the Pentagon. Abbott recently travelled to Israel and Switzerland, and he has drafted a revised U.S. Constitution, which he intends to bring before a Constitutional Convention. He’s obviously positioning himself for something larger than elected office in Texas. Cruz, meanwhile, has a reasonable shot at his party’s presidential nomination. And Palin is back, sounding the alarm about the “leftists in Washington destroying our military.” “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content,” Hofstadter wrote. “I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.” If political rhetoric is any measure of the moment, a short excerpt of the speech Sarah Palin delivered when she endorsed Donald Trump on January 19 illustrates how far around the bend the extremists in the modern Republican Party have gone.

Tell me, is this conservative? GOP majorities handing over a blank check to fund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood and illegal immigration that competes for your jobs, and turning safety nets into hammocks, and all these new Democrat voters that are going to be coming on over border as we keep the borders open, and bequeathing our children millions in new debt, and refusing to fight back for our solvency, and our sovereignty, even though that’s why we elected them and sent them as a majority to D.C. No! If they’re not willing to do that, then how are they to tell us that we’re not conservative enough in order to be able to make these changes in America that we know need to be . . . Now they’re concerned about this ideological purity? Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh tell somebody like, Phyllis Schlafly, she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter. Tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough?

Palin might be considered a marginal figure by sensible moderates in both parties. But she’s revered on the far right, and in the 200 words above she addresses most of the paranoid fears of today’s right: a treasonous government selling out our sovereignty, coming after our guns, eroding religious rights, inviting aliens into the country to take our jobs, treating the Constitution with contempt. Palin managed to include in one over-the top speech most of what animates today’s Republican right wing—a constituency of “political cranks and zealots” who have moved far beyond the extremists Hofstadter described in an essay written half a century ago. This story was first published by the Washington Spectator One day before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Richard Hofstadter was in London, delivering a lecture that a year later would appear in Harper’s as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” At 47 years of age, Hofstadter was an American brand. He held an endowed chair at Columbia University—not to mention two Pulitzers. He was considered to be one of the finest historians and public intellectuals of his time. Right-wing putschists led by Barry Goldwater (and the evidently immortal Phyllis Schlafly) had seized control of the Republican Party, muscling aside Nelson Rockefeller and the moderate wing he represented. Hofstadter was alarmed. “The Paranoid Style” was his red flag. In the introduction to a 2007 Vintage Books collection of Hofstadter’s political writing, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz describes the 1964 essay as “a study of political cranks and zealots” in which the author described “a chronic, rancid syndrome in our political life.” Indigenous and deeply rooted in American history, the paranoid politics Hofstadter described began with a panic among Federalists, echoed in New England’s pulpits in 1789, when preachers warned of the Bavarian Illuminati plots to undermine the new republic. In the 1820s and 1830s the nation was seized with a fear of Masons, who were perceived to be a threat to republican government because Masonry was a secret society with its own system of loyalty and its own jurisdictions. Public hysteria about Masonic plots was followed by an anti-Catholic movement focused on the Society of Jesus, better known as Jesuits. “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritans,” Hofstadter wrote. All of this is understandable in a young nation defining itself and defending itself from external and internal threats. It’s when Hofstadter takes what he describes as the long jump to the contemporary right wing that the paranoid style of politics he describes speaks to our current political moment. It doesn’t take much more of a leap to conclude that the same rancid syndrome, which Hofstadter chronicled as occurring in episodic waves in American political life, is upon us today, and the political cranks and zealots are Republican voters animated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. In the sixties, the country hadn’t entirely moved beyond McCarthyism, and the fear that the highest levels of the federal government had been infiltrated by communists who were selling out U.S. national interests. That particular obsession is largely a relic of the past, perhaps with the exception of religious loons such as Pat Robertson, and Rev. Rafael Cruz (father of Ted), who has referred to Barack Obama as a socialist aligned with Cuba’s Castro brothers. Read “The Paranoid Style”—eliding the references to the communist menace—and you’ll discover an insightful analysis of the overheated rhetoric and reckless posturing that is the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Hofstadter quoted Harvard professor Daniel Bell’s description of “the modern right wing” of the 1960s. If Bell’s description weren’t so articulate, it could be passed off as briefing notes for Sarah Palin’s speechwriter.

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind; though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; capitalism has been gradually undermined . . . the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen at the very centers of American power.

The “modern right wing” of 2016? You can find it at a Trump rally in a Birmingham stadium or a Cruz caucus in Iowa—even with Palin on the hustings in New Hampshire—promising to take back our country from the intellectual elites who have dispossessed “real Americans.” Like today’s Republican presidential candidates, Hofstadter’s paranoids opposed the income tax and worked to repeal it. They were anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan. They had a deep-seated aversion to “the democracies of Western Europe.” They harbored a “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” They envisioned the enemy eroding our values and undermining our national security: “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.” Throw in “African-American”—which was beyond even the most febrile delusions of the hysterical conservatives of the 1960s— and you’ve almost got Rev. Raphael Cruz’s description of the sybaritic, foreign-born Muslim pretender to the American presidency. How close are we to Yogi Berra’s “déjà vu all over again?” Hofstadter’s essay quoted a New York Times story about conspiracy theorists who warned of a covert collaboration between the Department of Defense and the United Nations:

A United States Army guerrilla warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is actually a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over our country.

At the time, only one inconsequential three-term Congressman from Orange County, California, bought into the alleged plot that had President Kennedy dismantling the U.S. military and replacing it with a U.N. peacekeeping force. Last summer, when a group of “patriots” in the small Texas town of Bastrop claimed that a routine training operation conducted by the U.S. Army was a covert U.N. mission, and that U.N. vans had been filmed in Walmart parking lots, Governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas Guard to monitor the operation. As senator, Cruz directed his staff to begin an inquiry at the Pentagon. Abbott recently travelled to Israel and Switzerland, and he has drafted a revised U.S. Constitution, which he intends to bring before a Constitutional Convention. He’s obviously positioning himself for something larger than elected office in Texas. Cruz, meanwhile, has a reasonable shot at his party’s presidential nomination. And Palin is back, sounding the alarm about the “leftists in Washington destroying our military.” “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content,” Hofstadter wrote. “I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.” If political rhetoric is any measure of the moment, a short excerpt of the speech Sarah Palin delivered when she endorsed Donald Trump on January 19 illustrates how far around the bend the extremists in the modern Republican Party have gone.

Tell me, is this conservative? GOP majorities handing over a blank check to fund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood and illegal immigration that competes for your jobs, and turning safety nets into hammocks, and all these new Democrat voters that are going to be coming on over border as we keep the borders open, and bequeathing our children millions in new debt, and refusing to fight back for our solvency, and our sovereignty, even though that’s why we elected them and sent them as a majority to D.C. No! If they’re not willing to do that, then how are they to tell us that we’re not conservative enough in order to be able to make these changes in America that we know need to be . . . Now they’re concerned about this ideological purity? Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh tell somebody like, Phyllis Schlafly, she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter. Tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough?

Palin might be considered a marginal figure by sensible moderates in both parties. But she’s revered on the far right, and in the 200 words above she addresses most of the paranoid fears of today’s right: a treasonous government selling out our sovereignty, coming after our guns, eroding religious rights, inviting aliens into the country to take our jobs, treating the Constitution with contempt. Palin managed to include in one over-the top speech most of what animates today’s Republican right wing—a constituency of “political cranks and zealots” who have moved far beyond the extremists Hofstadter described in an essay written half a century ago. This story was first published by the Washington Spectator One day before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Richard Hofstadter was in London, delivering a lecture that a year later would appear in Harper’s as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” At 47 years of age, Hofstadter was an American brand. He held an endowed chair at Columbia University—not to mention two Pulitzers. He was considered to be one of the finest historians and public intellectuals of his time. Right-wing putschists led by Barry Goldwater (and the evidently immortal Phyllis Schlafly) had seized control of the Republican Party, muscling aside Nelson Rockefeller and the moderate wing he represented. Hofstadter was alarmed. “The Paranoid Style” was his red flag. In the introduction to a 2007 Vintage Books collection of Hofstadter’s political writing, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz describes the 1964 essay as “a study of political cranks and zealots” in which the author described “a chronic, rancid syndrome in our political life.” Indigenous and deeply rooted in American history, the paranoid politics Hofstadter described began with a panic among Federalists, echoed in New England’s pulpits in 1789, when preachers warned of the Bavarian Illuminati plots to undermine the new republic. In the 1820s and 1830s the nation was seized with a fear of Masons, who were perceived to be a threat to republican government because Masonry was a secret society with its own system of loyalty and its own jurisdictions. Public hysteria about Masonic plots was followed by an anti-Catholic movement focused on the Society of Jesus, better known as Jesuits. “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritans,” Hofstadter wrote. All of this is understandable in a young nation defining itself and defending itself from external and internal threats. It’s when Hofstadter takes what he describes as the long jump to the contemporary right wing that the paranoid style of politics he describes speaks to our current political moment. It doesn’t take much more of a leap to conclude that the same rancid syndrome, which Hofstadter chronicled as occurring in episodic waves in American political life, is upon us today, and the political cranks and zealots are Republican voters animated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. In the sixties, the country hadn’t entirely moved beyond McCarthyism, and the fear that the highest levels of the federal government had been infiltrated by communists who were selling out U.S. national interests. That particular obsession is largely a relic of the past, perhaps with the exception of religious loons such as Pat Robertson, and Rev. Rafael Cruz (father of Ted), who has referred to Barack Obama as a socialist aligned with Cuba’s Castro brothers. Read “The Paranoid Style”—eliding the references to the communist menace—and you’ll discover an insightful analysis of the overheated rhetoric and reckless posturing that is the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Hofstadter quoted Harvard professor Daniel Bell’s description of “the modern right wing” of the 1960s. If Bell’s description weren’t so articulate, it could be passed off as briefing notes for Sarah Palin’s speechwriter.

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind; though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; capitalism has been gradually undermined . . . the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen at the very centers of American power.

The “modern right wing” of 2016? You can find it at a Trump rally in a Birmingham stadium or a Cruz caucus in Iowa—even with Palin on the hustings in New Hampshire—promising to take back our country from the intellectual elites who have dispossessed “real Americans.” Like today’s Republican presidential candidates, Hofstadter’s paranoids opposed the income tax and worked to repeal it. They were anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan. They had a deep-seated aversion to “the democracies of Western Europe.” They harbored a “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” They envisioned the enemy eroding our values and undermining our national security: “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.” Throw in “African-American”—which was beyond even the most febrile delusions of the hysterical conservatives of the 1960s— and you’ve almost got Rev. Raphael Cruz’s description of the sybaritic, foreign-born Muslim pretender to the American presidency. How close are we to Yogi Berra’s “déjà vu all over again?” Hofstadter’s essay quoted a New York Times story about conspiracy theorists who warned of a covert collaboration between the Department of Defense and the United Nations:

A United States Army guerrilla warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is actually a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over our country.

At the time, only one inconsequential three-term Congressman from Orange County, California, bought into the alleged plot that had President Kennedy dismantling the U.S. military and replacing it with a U.N. peacekeeping force. Last summer, when a group of “patriots” in the small Texas town of Bastrop claimed that a routine training operation conducted by the U.S. Army was a covert U.N. mission, and that U.N. vans had been filmed in Walmart parking lots, Governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas Guard to monitor the operation. As senator, Cruz directed his staff to begin an inquiry at the Pentagon. Abbott recently travelled to Israel and Switzerland, and he has drafted a revised U.S. Constitution, which he intends to bring before a Constitutional Convention. He’s obviously positioning himself for something larger than elected office in Texas. Cruz, meanwhile, has a reasonable shot at his party’s presidential nomination. And Palin is back, sounding the alarm about the “leftists in Washington destroying our military.” “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content,” Hofstadter wrote. “I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.” If political rhetoric is any measure of the moment, a short excerpt of the speech Sarah Palin delivered when she endorsed Donald Trump on January 19 illustrates how far around the bend the extremists in the modern Republican Party have gone.

Tell me, is this conservative? GOP majorities handing over a blank check to fund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood and illegal immigration that competes for your jobs, and turning safety nets into hammocks, and all these new Democrat voters that are going to be coming on over border as we keep the borders open, and bequeathing our children millions in new debt, and refusing to fight back for our solvency, and our sovereignty, even though that’s why we elected them and sent them as a majority to D.C. No! If they’re not willing to do that, then how are they to tell us that we’re not conservative enough in order to be able to make these changes in America that we know need to be . . . Now they’re concerned about this ideological purity? Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh tell somebody like, Phyllis Schlafly, she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter. Tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough?

Palin might be considered a marginal figure by sensible moderates in both parties. But she’s revered on the far right, and in the 200 words above she addresses most of the paranoid fears of today’s right: a treasonous government selling out our sovereignty, coming after our guns, eroding religious rights, inviting aliens into the country to take our jobs, treating the Constitution with contempt. Palin managed to include in one over-the top speech most of what animates today’s Republican right wing—a constituency of “political cranks and zealots” who have moved far beyond the extremists Hofstadter described in an essay written half a century ago. This story was first published by the Washington Spectator

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Borked! America’s creepiest-ever Supreme Court nominee still haunts our broken system

Not long after I moved to New York from California in the mid-1990s, I was walking somewhere in midtown Manhattan and nearly collided with Robert Bork, who was coming out of a hotel carrying his suitcase. (One of my first thoughts: Robert Bork carries his own suitcase?) I recoiled mentally, and quite likely physically as well; it was like coming face to face with Lord Voldemort, or a highly venomous cobra, on 54th Street. Bork did not appear to notice and carried on with lugging his suitcase to the waiting car. I reflected later that he had to spend his entire life being Robert Bork, and after 1987 that must have involved a lot of double takes from strangers. (That’s as close to compassion for that guy as I’m going to get, I’m sorry.) Bork was the creepiest and most contentious Supreme Court nominee of all time, and on a list that includes Clarence Thomas that’s quite an accomplishment. He is presumably the only SCOTUS nominee ever accused of possessing too weird a beard (that from Sen. Howell Heflin, an Alabama Dixiecrat who hinted that Bork’s Amish-style wraparound suggested a “strange lifestyle”), and the only one to accuse his opponents of “scurrility,” a noun that began to drift out of the English vocabulary around the middle of the 19th century. Now Bork is back, amid the farcical furor surrounding Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, even though the actual person I encountered on that Manhattan sidewalk died in 2012. In some senses he never went away. Alive and dead, Bork’s bearded visage has haunted American law and American politics for 30 years. He was overwhelmingly rejected by the Senate in October of 1987, with six Republican senators joining 52 Democrats in voting against him. It was the largest such defeat for any high-court nominee in 176 years, and the American far right has nursed a grudge about it ever since. But that was definitely not the end of the Borkodyssey. Whatever relationship you perceive between the Garland nomination and the Bork debacle — and it’s more complicated than either side is willing to admit — Republicans have seized upon Garland as a ritual sacrifice and a long-awaited moment of Bork payback. What’s more, Obama and the Democrats knew that would happen (because the Senate Republicans clearly said it would) and both parties are playing the whole thing for political advantage. Merrick Garland is essentially a footnote, thrown into the shade by a dead guy with a weird beard. It’s not even accurate to say that Garland, the D.C. appellate court judge whom Obama has nominated to replace right-wing hero Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, is about to be Borked. Garland has been pre-Borked, or über-Borked. This is an illegitimate nominee put forward by an illegitimate president (in the most distilled version of the Republican worldview), who therefore does not even deserve to be Borked. Oh snap, Mitch McConnell! You have raised Borking to the power of infinity. You have merged Borking and voguing. You haven’t Borked just one person; you have Borked the world. Whether Merrick Garland resembles Robert Bork in the slightest, as a jurist or a person — whether it's remotely fair to categorize him as a “liberal Bork” — is irrelevant. I mean, he doesn't and it isn't, but that doesn't matter. If you ask me, the Garland charade is one of those moments that reveal the hypocrisy of both political parties. Don't look so shocked, Democrats: I'm not saying there's no difference between them, or that one version of political hypocrisy is not preferable to the other. But it's ludicrous for Democrats to get the vapors and stagger around in exaggerated disbelief, announcing that Republicans have politicized the nomination process and who could ever have imagined that such a dreadful thing would happen? No, Garland isn't Bork and yes, by any conventional standard he is qualified for the Supreme Court. Send him back in a time machine and Richard Nixon would probably appoint him, which was more or less the point of picking him. But in terms of our contemporary political drama, Garland is the patsy or the fall guy. He's like the bespectacled accountant who goes to prison instead of Tony Soprano, and what he will get out of it I have no idea. (He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who yearns for a Vegas condo full of hookers, or who believes his suffering will get paid back in heaven. But what do I know?) Honestly, you have to feel for the guy: Garland got all choked up in the Rose Garden talking about what an honor this was and how much he loves his wife, and that was lovely. But when he hears his first case as a Supreme Court justice, it is likely to involve pigs flying over the frozen wasteland of hell. If he doesn't understand that, he's dumber than he looks. I suppose Garland allowed himself a few moments of wishful thinking while he sat there in the Oval Office with Obama and Joe Biden whispering sweet nothings in his ear — and it's possible there is a devious long game at work here, in which he gets renominated next year by President Hillary Clinton. (He resembles a Clinton nominee more than an Obama nominee, although it's a fine distinction.) But it can't feel good to be nominated for the highest court in the land, fulfilling the nerdy daydreams of every ramen-eating law student who has ever purchased a Brooks Brothers knockoff suit, while suspecting that you are destined to become the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. Garland was engineered to be the un-Bork or the anti-Bork, who would be Borked anyway as a demonstration of GOP intransigence. His nomination is all about making the Republicans look bad and boosting the Democrats' chances of retaking the Senate; fitting Associate Justice Garland for one of those velvety black robes, even if it happens, would be an accidental afterthought. Democrats are of course correct that the Republicans are being obnoxious and small-minded, and pursuing the politics of total obstruction even when faced with the most moderate, most reasonable and least objectionable nominee anyone could possibly imagine. (If the Senate were actually to consider Garland seriously, we would start to hear objections — mostly from the left.) But Republicans are at least partly correct that it was Democrats who turned the Senate confirmation process into a political war zone, almost 30 years ago. Bork was nominated by Ronald Reagan to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee who had been a reliably conservative vote but not a hard-line troglodyte. (Powell voted with the majority in the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, for instance.) Bork’s nomination epitomized the growing power of the far right late in the Reagan era, when the jovial president was — how shall we put it? — just a bit checked out on the details of government, not to mention unclear about what day it was. Naming Bork was also a deliberate provocation, and something of a Fort Sumter moment in the bitter partisan civil war of the last several decades. Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor 45 minutes after Reagan made the announcement to deliver a stinging speech about "Robert Bork's America," where, Kennedy said, lunch counters would once again be segregated, women would be forced into back-alley abortions and schoolchildren would no longer be taught evolution. Bork's nomination never recovered from that onslaught, but as you may have noticed many of Kennedy's threats reverberate even more ominously today. No doubt Reagan’s strategists and allies believed they would prevail in the Bork battle. Scalia, who was every bit as conservative, had been confirmed by the Senate 98-0 a year earlier, a vote many Democrats would live to regret. But they must have known they were in for a fight. Bork had been a symbolic right-wing hero since the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when he was the highest-ranking Justice Department official willing to obey Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. (Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy had both resigned instead of following a blatantly illegal presidential directive.) Both as a prominent law professor at Yale and as a judge on the D.C. circuit court (the same one where Garland now sits), Bork did more to advance the counterrevolutionary judicial philosophy known as “originalism” than anyone else. The only way to undo the generations of damage done by activist judges who “legislate from the bench” and understand the Constitution as a living and evolving set of guidelines rather than an inflexible scripture, Bork argued, was to uncover the “original understanding” of the framers and stick to it. Some ultraconservative legal minds would later suggest that Bork’s originalism didn’t go far enough; I’m pretty sure Ted Cruz, the SuperBork cyborg, falls into this category. To many people’s tastes Bork went plenty far. In his reading of the Constitution he discerned no right of privacy, and he barely tried to conceal how he would vote if and when Roe v. Wade came up for review. (That mistake and many others, up to and including the hectoring, pedantic demeanor and the Alexander Solzhenitsyn tonsorial choices, would not be repeated by any subsequent nominee.) Bork saw no constitutional basis for the federal government to enact civil-rights or voting-rights laws, or to enumerate specific rights for groups the framers hadn't thought about, including women and gay people. He believed that federal antitrust laws and environmental regulations were largely unconstitutional (except when they applied to interstate commerce). It was not at all clear that Bork thought the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which ended slavery and redefined the rights of citizenship, or the 19th, which extended the vote to women, or any of the others passed since about 1795, could survive in the harsh light of originalism. You can call Bork all kinds of names, but you can’t call him a hypocrite. He was nowhere near hypocritical enough to survive in the political climate of the 1980s, when the radical views he embraced struck many Americans, including many Republicans, as bizarre artifacts of the right-wing fringe. Scalia subscribed to exactly the same originalist doctrine but was a smoother character, a clubby Washington type who joked with Democratic senators about their tennis games and sailed through without opposition. I don’t blame Kennedy and Joe Biden (then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee) and the NAACP for singling out Bork and turning his nomination into a political litmus test. But as the Scalia case makes clear, they did so for the wrong reasons: Not because Bork was an ideological renegade who wanted to roll basic concepts of American justice and equality back to pre-Civil War standards, but because he was an arrogant, funny-looking weirdo who was easy to defeat. Merrick Garland may have a similar problem: He doesn't seem hypocritical enough for Washington politics either. If he took a more cynical view of the world, Garland might understand that he has no chance of being confirmed by the Senate, that he is being used as a political pawn and that he embodies all too perfectly the Democrats’ ineffectual response to the right’s long-term campaign of legal conquest. If Bork’s originalist theology has not triumphed entirely, no one would claim today that it's outside the mainstream of constitutional thought. It has become universal Republican orthodoxy and is widely taught in law school; it's the motivating force behind Ted Cruz’s political career. Looking back at the Bork nomination, we may well ask who actually won that 1987 struggle, and who lost. The Republican Bork was, well, Bork — an erudite right-wing revolutionary who fought for enormous changes in American law and American society, and lived to see many of his goals accomplished. The Democratic Bork is a likable fellow who loves his wife and is deemed inoffensive to all. One of them changed history, even in defeat; the other is likely to end up as historical roadkill.Not long after I moved to New York from California in the mid-1990s, I was walking somewhere in midtown Manhattan and nearly collided with Robert Bork, who was coming out of a hotel carrying his suitcase. (One of my first thoughts: Robert Bork carries his own suitcase?) I recoiled mentally, and quite likely physically as well; it was like coming face to face with Lord Voldemort, or a highly venomous cobra, on 54th Street. Bork did not appear to notice and carried on with lugging his suitcase to the waiting car. I reflected later that he had to spend his entire life being Robert Bork, and after 1987 that must have involved a lot of double takes from strangers. (That’s as close to compassion for that guy as I’m going to get, I’m sorry.) Bork was the creepiest and most contentious Supreme Court nominee of all time, and on a list that includes Clarence Thomas that’s quite an accomplishment. He is presumably the only SCOTUS nominee ever accused of possessing too weird a beard (that from Sen. Howell Heflin, an Alabama Dixiecrat who hinted that Bork’s Amish-style wraparound suggested a “strange lifestyle”), and the only one to accuse his opponents of “scurrility,” a noun that began to drift out of the English vocabulary around the middle of the 19th century. Now Bork is back, amid the farcical furor surrounding Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, even though the actual person I encountered on that Manhattan sidewalk died in 2012. In some senses he never went away. Alive and dead, Bork’s bearded visage has haunted American law and American politics for 30 years. He was overwhelmingly rejected by the Senate in October of 1987, with six Republican senators joining 52 Democrats in voting against him. It was the largest such defeat for any high-court nominee in 176 years, and the American far right has nursed a grudge about it ever since. But that was definitely not the end of the Borkodyssey. Whatever relationship you perceive between the Garland nomination and the Bork debacle — and it’s more complicated than either side is willing to admit — Republicans have seized upon Garland as a ritual sacrifice and a long-awaited moment of Bork payback. What’s more, Obama and the Democrats knew that would happen (because the Senate Republicans clearly said it would) and both parties are playing the whole thing for political advantage. Merrick Garland is essentially a footnote, thrown into the shade by a dead guy with a weird beard. It’s not even accurate to say that Garland, the D.C. appellate court judge whom Obama has nominated to replace right-wing hero Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, is about to be Borked. Garland has been pre-Borked, or über-Borked. This is an illegitimate nominee put forward by an illegitimate president (in the most distilled version of the Republican worldview), who therefore does not even deserve to be Borked. Oh snap, Mitch McConnell! You have raised Borking to the power of infinity. You have merged Borking and voguing. You haven’t Borked just one person; you have Borked the world. Whether Merrick Garland resembles Robert Bork in the slightest, as a jurist or a person — whether it's remotely fair to categorize him as a “liberal Bork” — is irrelevant. I mean, he doesn't and it isn't, but that doesn't matter. If you ask me, the Garland charade is one of those moments that reveal the hypocrisy of both political parties. Don't look so shocked, Democrats: I'm not saying there's no difference between them, or that one version of political hypocrisy is not preferable to the other. But it's ludicrous for Democrats to get the vapors and stagger around in exaggerated disbelief, announcing that Republicans have politicized the nomination process and who could ever have imagined that such a dreadful thing would happen? No, Garland isn't Bork and yes, by any conventional standard he is qualified for the Supreme Court. Send him back in a time machine and Richard Nixon would probably appoint him, which was more or less the point of picking him. But in terms of our contemporary political drama, Garland is the patsy or the fall guy. He's like the bespectacled accountant who goes to prison instead of Tony Soprano, and what he will get out of it I have no idea. (He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who yearns for a Vegas condo full of hookers, or who believes his suffering will get paid back in heaven. But what do I know?) Honestly, you have to feel for the guy: Garland got all choked up in the Rose Garden talking about what an honor this was and how much he loves his wife, and that was lovely. But when he hears his first case as a Supreme Court justice, it is likely to involve pigs flying over the frozen wasteland of hell. If he doesn't understand that, he's dumber than he looks. I suppose Garland allowed himself a few moments of wishful thinking while he sat there in the Oval Office with Obama and Joe Biden whispering sweet nothings in his ear — and it's possible there is a devious long game at work here, in which he gets renominated next year by President Hillary Clinton. (He resembles a Clinton nominee more than an Obama nominee, although it's a fine distinction.) But it can't feel good to be nominated for the highest court in the land, fulfilling the nerdy daydreams of every ramen-eating law student who has ever purchased a Brooks Brothers knockoff suit, while suspecting that you are destined to become the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. Garland was engineered to be the un-Bork or the anti-Bork, who would be Borked anyway as a demonstration of GOP intransigence. His nomination is all about making the Republicans look bad and boosting the Democrats' chances of retaking the Senate; fitting Associate Justice Garland for one of those velvety black robes, even if it happens, would be an accidental afterthought. Democrats are of course correct that the Republicans are being obnoxious and small-minded, and pursuing the politics of total obstruction even when faced with the most moderate, most reasonable and least objectionable nominee anyone could possibly imagine. (If the Senate were actually to consider Garland seriously, we would start to hear objections — mostly from the left.) But Republicans are at least partly correct that it was Democrats who turned the Senate confirmation process into a political war zone, almost 30 years ago. Bork was nominated by Ronald Reagan to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee who had been a reliably conservative vote but not a hard-line troglodyte. (Powell voted with the majority in the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, for instance.) Bork’s nomination epitomized the growing power of the far right late in the Reagan era, when the jovial president was — how shall we put it? — just a bit checked out on the details of government, not to mention unclear about what day it was. Naming Bork was also a deliberate provocation, and something of a Fort Sumter moment in the bitter partisan civil war of the last several decades. Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor 45 minutes after Reagan made the announcement to deliver a stinging speech about "Robert Bork's America," where, Kennedy said, lunch counters would once again be segregated, women would be forced into back-alley abortions and schoolchildren would no longer be taught evolution. Bork's nomination never recovered from that onslaught, but as you may have noticed many of Kennedy's threats reverberate even more ominously today. No doubt Reagan’s strategists and allies believed they would prevail in the Bork battle. Scalia, who was every bit as conservative, had been confirmed by the Senate 98-0 a year earlier, a vote many Democrats would live to regret. But they must have known they were in for a fight. Bork had been a symbolic right-wing hero since the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when he was the highest-ranking Justice Department official willing to obey Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. (Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy had both resigned instead of following a blatantly illegal presidential directive.) Both as a prominent law professor at Yale and as a judge on the D.C. circuit court (the same one where Garland now sits), Bork did more to advance the counterrevolutionary judicial philosophy known as “originalism” than anyone else. The only way to undo the generations of damage done by activist judges who “legislate from the bench” and understand the Constitution as a living and evolving set of guidelines rather than an inflexible scripture, Bork argued, was to uncover the “original understanding” of the framers and stick to it. Some ultraconservative legal minds would later suggest that Bork’s originalism didn’t go far enough; I’m pretty sure Ted Cruz, the SuperBork cyborg, falls into this category. To many people’s tastes Bork went plenty far. In his reading of the Constitution he discerned no right of privacy, and he barely tried to conceal how he would vote if and when Roe v. Wade came up for review. (That mistake and many others, up to and including the hectoring, pedantic demeanor and the Alexander Solzhenitsyn tonsorial choices, would not be repeated by any subsequent nominee.) Bork saw no constitutional basis for the federal government to enact civil-rights or voting-rights laws, or to enumerate specific rights for groups the framers hadn't thought about, including women and gay people. He believed that federal antitrust laws and environmental regulations were largely unconstitutional (except when they applied to interstate commerce). It was not at all clear that Bork thought the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which ended slavery and redefined the rights of citizenship, or the 19th, which extended the vote to women, or any of the others passed since about 1795, could survive in the harsh light of originalism. You can call Bork all kinds of names, but you can’t call him a hypocrite. He was nowhere near hypocritical enough to survive in the political climate of the 1980s, when the radical views he embraced struck many Americans, including many Republicans, as bizarre artifacts of the right-wing fringe. Scalia subscribed to exactly the same originalist doctrine but was a smoother character, a clubby Washington type who joked with Democratic senators about their tennis games and sailed through without opposition. I don’t blame Kennedy and Joe Biden (then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee) and the NAACP for singling out Bork and turning his nomination into a political litmus test. But as the Scalia case makes clear, they did so for the wrong reasons: Not because Bork was an ideological renegade who wanted to roll basic concepts of American justice and equality back to pre-Civil War standards, but because he was an arrogant, funny-looking weirdo who was easy to defeat. Merrick Garland may have a similar problem: He doesn't seem hypocritical enough for Washington politics either. If he took a more cynical view of the world, Garland might understand that he has no chance of being confirmed by the Senate, that he is being used as a political pawn and that he embodies all too perfectly the Democrats’ ineffectual response to the right’s long-term campaign of legal conquest. If Bork’s originalist theology has not triumphed entirely, no one would claim today that it's outside the mainstream of constitutional thought. It has become universal Republican orthodoxy and is widely taught in law school; it's the motivating force behind Ted Cruz’s political career. Looking back at the Bork nomination, we may well ask who actually won that 1987 struggle, and who lost. The Republican Bork was, well, Bork — an erudite right-wing revolutionary who fought for enormous changes in American law and American society, and lived to see many of his goals accomplished. The Democratic Bork is a likable fellow who loves his wife and is deemed inoffensive to all. One of them changed history, even in defeat; the other is likely to end up as historical roadkill.

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Trump’s disingenuous Ted Cruz smear: Birtherism is back, still dangerous and wrong

Perhaps President Obama was waiting for the prime opportunity to describe “birtherism” as a symptom of a broader pathology afflicting the Republican Party. Lucky for him, that moment arrived during a joint press conference this week with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when CBS News reporter Margaret Brennan asked Obama if he bears any responsibility for the polarized politics that brought us “someone as provocative as Donald Trump.” “I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things,” Obama said. “But being blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting for their party is novel . . . I don’t think that I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example. I don’t remember saying ‘Hey, why don’t you ask me about that? Why don’t you question whether I’m an American?’” Obama returned to the theme later that day, when, at a state dinner, he described the United States as a land of extraordinary opportunity. “We see this in our current presidential campaign. Where else could a boy born in Calgary run for president of the United States?” Revenge is a dish best served cold—and it’s even better when there’s a bemused smile on the face of the server. It was Trump who seized upon fringe claims about Obama’s birthplace, and who even went so far as to hire his own private eye to go to Hawaii to “investigate.” More recently, it was Trump who went full “birther” on Ted Cruz. Trump didn’t come up with the idea that Obama wasn’t a citizen; he just made it his own. Nor was Trump first in line with questions about Cruz’s U.S. citizenship. When Cruz took his first steps on the road to the presidency shortly after taking his Senate seat in 2013, prospective opponents began to float questions about his place of birth. The Texas senator immediately declared himself a natural-born citizen. Eventually, just to play it safe, he renounced his birthright Canadian citizenship. At the time, I wrote in The Washington Spectator that Cruz was hoping to inoculate himself for the upcoming presidential race. Though I’m a political consultant and researcher, not an attorney, I concluded that while there is a mountain of reasons to vote against Cruz, claiming he is Canadian is a dead end, because the senator met a “natural born” citizen test. The Canadian birth question had been almost forgotten—until Trump asked, “Are we so sure about that?” With a bit of help from the media, the discussion came roaring back into the public eye. In fact, the media fell so hard for Trump’s pitch that even The Washington Post’s KidsPost—a news source geared to the middle school set—declared that “a court might have to decide” if Cruz can be president. Courts are deciding and dismissing lawsuits without ruling on the merits. But the question remains: are there merits? The short answer is absolutely not. Cruz’s status is no different than Obama’s, McCain’s, Mitt Romney’s—or Mitt’s father George, who, after serving in Nixon’s cabinet, briefly ran for the presidency in 1968 even though he was born in Mexico. What changed is the arrival of Donald Trump, who’s a genius at manipulating both message and media. Trump has made sure that doubts about Cruz’s citizenship will linger, perhaps peeling off 10,000 votes here or there among voters who buy Trump’s claim, as disingenuous as it is. How disingenuous? Remember the debate in July, when Trump referenced a Boston Globe op-ed by liberal jurist Laurence Tribe that had “raised serious questions” about Cruz’s citizenship? Tribe had consistently argued that Ted Cruz is not only American, but a “natural born citizen.” Yet Tribe also observed that it is Ted Cruz’s originalist friends who say he can’t be president. Tribe understands the legal concepts behind “originalism” better than most conservatives. Under Tribe’s (and almost every other legal scholar’s) interpretation of the Constitution, there is no doubt that Cruz is a natural-born American. But as Tribe’s article pointed out, Cruz and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, among others, have professed a devout faith in a “pure originalist doctrine,” which has inspired a lot of angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments over what the founders meant when they invented the term “natural born.” To borrow a phrase from Justice Scalia, conservatives abandoned common sense to argle-bargle a few legal notions to conclude Cruz can’t be president. If you read the hot mess that is Article II, Section I of the Constitution, it seems incredible that the founders didn’t think all this through. (You can learn more about that here.) But remember—the Constitution was a blueprint for a system of government that didn’t exist yet. So when several delegates demanded language to protect us from foreign threats, the drafters slapped down some confusing legalese they lifted from British legal sources that defined who was a “subject of His Majesty’s Crown.” Like Trump followers today, a few of the founders had an irrational dread of immigrants, particularly foreigners who might seize the U.S. government. To be fair, foreign leaders seizing countries was a legitimate concern back in the 18th century. After Tribe’s op-ed, law historian Mary Brigid McManamon concluded in a Washington Post op-ed that while  Senator Cruz is unquestionably American through “blood rights,” he is not truly “natural-born.” Rather, he is in a legal hybrid category known as “naturalized at birth.” Most legal scholars will reject McManamon’s claim on the grounds of equal rights. For centuries England extended “natural born” status on sons born overseas to British fathers. The United States adopted similar laws, granting natural-born status to the sons of overseas American fathers, while sons of mothers married to foreigners could only be “naturalized at birth.” Which brings us back to George Romney. Born in 1907 in Mexico, Romney’s Mormon father and his three wives (there was a reason the elder Romney fled America) were all natural-born Americans. So, when the issue of George Romney’s birth came up in 1968, legal scholars and even the Congressional Research Service, concluded Romney was a natural-born American. Ted Cruz is George Romney’s mirror image: if it had been Cruz’s mother who was the naturalized Cuban-American, while his dad was Delaware-born “Ralph Welcome Cross” instead of “Rafael Bienvenido Cruz,” the senator would have automatically made the natural-born club. That is why legal scholars now say that it is impossible to imagine that any federal court would rule that American males would today have more rights than a natural-born American female. But none of this matters because Cruz’s case will never be heard in court. After dozens of rulings in lawsuits involving both George and Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Barack Obama, the federal courts have effectively declared no citizen has any standing to sue a candidate over presidential eligibility. Lawsuits challenging Cruz’s eligibility—filed in Florida, New York, Alabama, Illinois, Texas, and Pennsylvania—are going nowhere. The suits in New York, Florida, and Illinois have been tossed out. On March 10, a state judge in Harrisburg heard arguments on a similar case and said he will present his ruling soon. Not that the Cruz birthers will give it up; it’s part of Trump’s “Real White Americans vs. the Aliens” politics. And he’s learned that it works. Recall that in 2000, Trump briefly ran for the Reform Party nomination, even contesting the California primary, where he lost by almost two to one.  Back then the Donald was the opposite of the personality we see today. He wanted voters to support his plans for universal health care and tax reform that cut rates for the middle class while raising them on the wealthy. As part of that effort, Trump made his now notorious appearance on “Meet The Press,” where he declared himself a liberal who supported abortion rights. Because the Reform Party self-destructed in 2000, most of us never saw “Wonky Trump”—savaged by leftists who split from the Reform Party to back Ralph Nader and outflanked on the right by Pat Buchanan, who received standing ovations declaring White America under attack by hordes of Mexican immigrants and asserting that his first act as president would be to send troops to seal off the Mexican border, with orders to shoot anyone trying to cross. Trump today is all about “testicular fortitude,” not real policy. His only issue is protecting “us” from the dreaded “them”—to that end, he transformed his chief rival, Ted Cruz, into an alien. This article was first published by the Washington Spectator Perhaps President Obama was waiting for the prime opportunity to describe “birtherism” as a symptom of a broader pathology afflicting the Republican Party. Lucky for him, that moment arrived during a joint press conference this week with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when CBS News reporter Margaret Brennan asked Obama if he bears any responsibility for the polarized politics that brought us “someone as provocative as Donald Trump.” “I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things,” Obama said. “But being blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting for their party is novel . . . I don’t think that I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example. I don’t remember saying ‘Hey, why don’t you ask me about that? Why don’t you question whether I’m an American?’” Obama returned to the theme later that day, when, at a state dinner, he described the United States as a land of extraordinary opportunity. “We see this in our current presidential campaign. Where else could a boy born in Calgary run for president of the United States?” Revenge is a dish best served cold—and it’s even better when there’s a bemused smile on the face of the server. It was Trump who seized upon fringe claims about Obama’s birthplace, and who even went so far as to hire his own private eye to go to Hawaii to “investigate.” More recently, it was Trump who went full “birther” on Ted Cruz. Trump didn’t come up with the idea that Obama wasn’t a citizen; he just made it his own. Nor was Trump first in line with questions about Cruz’s U.S. citizenship. When Cruz took his first steps on the road to the presidency shortly after taking his Senate seat in 2013, prospective opponents began to float questions about his place of birth. The Texas senator immediately declared himself a natural-born citizen. Eventually, just to play it safe, he renounced his birthright Canadian citizenship. At the time, I wrote in The Washington Spectator that Cruz was hoping to inoculate himself for the upcoming presidential race. Though I’m a political consultant and researcher, not an attorney, I concluded that while there is a mountain of reasons to vote against Cruz, claiming he is Canadian is a dead end, because the senator met a “natural born” citizen test. The Canadian birth question had been almost forgotten—until Trump asked, “Are we so sure about that?” With a bit of help from the media, the discussion came roaring back into the public eye. In fact, the media fell so hard for Trump’s pitch that even The Washington Post’s KidsPost—a news source geared to the middle school set—declared that “a court might have to decide” if Cruz can be president. Courts are deciding and dismissing lawsuits without ruling on the merits. But the question remains: are there merits? The short answer is absolutely not. Cruz’s status is no different than Obama’s, McCain’s, Mitt Romney’s—or Mitt’s father George, who, after serving in Nixon’s cabinet, briefly ran for the presidency in 1968 even though he was born in Mexico. What changed is the arrival of Donald Trump, who’s a genius at manipulating both message and media. Trump has made sure that doubts about Cruz’s citizenship will linger, perhaps peeling off 10,000 votes here or there among voters who buy Trump’s claim, as disingenuous as it is. How disingenuous? Remember the debate in July, when Trump referenced a Boston Globe op-ed by liberal jurist Laurence Tribe that had “raised serious questions” about Cruz’s citizenship? Tribe had consistently argued that Ted Cruz is not only American, but a “natural born citizen.” Yet Tribe also observed that it is Ted Cruz’s originalist friends who say he can’t be president. Tribe understands the legal concepts behind “originalism” better than most conservatives. Under Tribe’s (and almost every other legal scholar’s) interpretation of the Constitution, there is no doubt that Cruz is a natural-born American. But as Tribe’s article pointed out, Cruz and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, among others, have professed a devout faith in a “pure originalist doctrine,” which has inspired a lot of angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments over what the founders meant when they invented the term “natural born.” To borrow a phrase from Justice Scalia, conservatives abandoned common sense to argle-bargle a few legal notions to conclude Cruz can’t be president. If you read the hot mess that is Article II, Section I of the Constitution, it seems incredible that the founders didn’t think all this through. (You can learn more about that here.) But remember—the Constitution was a blueprint for a system of government that didn’t exist yet. So when several delegates demanded language to protect us from foreign threats, the drafters slapped down some confusing legalese they lifted from British legal sources that defined who was a “subject of His Majesty’s Crown.” Like Trump followers today, a few of the founders had an irrational dread of immigrants, particularly foreigners who might seize the U.S. government. To be fair, foreign leaders seizing countries was a legitimate concern back in the 18th century. After Tribe’s op-ed, law historian Mary Brigid McManamon concluded in a Washington Post op-ed that while  Senator Cruz is unquestionably American through “blood rights,” he is not truly “natural-born.” Rather, he is in a legal hybrid category known as “naturalized at birth.” Most legal scholars will reject McManamon’s claim on the grounds of equal rights. For centuries England extended “natural born” status on sons born overseas to British fathers. The United States adopted similar laws, granting natural-born status to the sons of overseas American fathers, while sons of mothers married to foreigners could only be “naturalized at birth.” Which brings us back to George Romney. Born in 1907 in Mexico, Romney’s Mormon father and his three wives (there was a reason the elder Romney fled America) were all natural-born Americans. So, when the issue of George Romney’s birth came up in 1968, legal scholars and even the Congressional Research Service, concluded Romney was a natural-born American. Ted Cruz is George Romney’s mirror image: if it had been Cruz’s mother who was the naturalized Cuban-American, while his dad was Delaware-born “Ralph Welcome Cross” instead of “Rafael Bienvenido Cruz,” the senator would have automatically made the natural-born club. That is why legal scholars now say that it is impossible to imagine that any federal court would rule that American males would today have more rights than a natural-born American female. But none of this matters because Cruz’s case will never be heard in court. After dozens of rulings in lawsuits involving both George and Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Barack Obama, the federal courts have effectively declared no citizen has any standing to sue a candidate over presidential eligibility. Lawsuits challenging Cruz’s eligibility—filed in Florida, New York, Alabama, Illinois, Texas, and Pennsylvania—are going nowhere. The suits in New York, Florida, and Illinois have been tossed out. On March 10, a state judge in Harrisburg heard arguments on a similar case and said he will present his ruling soon. Not that the Cruz birthers will give it up; it’s part of Trump’s “Real White Americans vs. the Aliens” politics. And he’s learned that it works. Recall that in 2000, Trump briefly ran for the Reform Party nomination, even contesting the California primary, where he lost by almost two to one.  Back then the Donald was the opposite of the personality we see today. He wanted voters to support his plans for universal health care and tax reform that cut rates for the middle class while raising them on the wealthy. As part of that effort, Trump made his now notorious appearance on “Meet The Press,” where he declared himself a liberal who supported abortion rights. Because the Reform Party self-destructed in 2000, most of us never saw “Wonky Trump”—savaged by leftists who split from the Reform Party to back Ralph Nader and outflanked on the right by Pat Buchanan, who received standing ovations declaring White America under attack by hordes of Mexican immigrants and asserting that his first act as president would be to send troops to seal off the Mexican border, with orders to shoot anyone trying to cross. Trump today is all about “testicular fortitude,” not real policy. His only issue is protecting “us” from the dreaded “them”—to that end, he transformed his chief rival, Ted Cruz, into an alien. This article was first published by the Washington Spectator Perhaps President Obama was waiting for the prime opportunity to describe “birtherism” as a symptom of a broader pathology afflicting the Republican Party. Lucky for him, that moment arrived during a joint press conference this week with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when CBS News reporter Margaret Brennan asked Obama if he bears any responsibility for the polarized politics that brought us “someone as provocative as Donald Trump.” “I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things,” Obama said. “But being blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting for their party is novel . . . I don’t think that I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example. I don’t remember saying ‘Hey, why don’t you ask me about that? Why don’t you question whether I’m an American?’” Obama returned to the theme later that day, when, at a state dinner, he described the United States as a land of extraordinary opportunity. “We see this in our current presidential campaign. Where else could a boy born in Calgary run for president of the United States?” Revenge is a dish best served cold—and it’s even better when there’s a bemused smile on the face of the server. It was Trump who seized upon fringe claims about Obama’s birthplace, and who even went so far as to hire his own private eye to go to Hawaii to “investigate.” More recently, it was Trump who went full “birther” on Ted Cruz. Trump didn’t come up with the idea that Obama wasn’t a citizen; he just made it his own. Nor was Trump first in line with questions about Cruz’s U.S. citizenship. When Cruz took his first steps on the road to the presidency shortly after taking his Senate seat in 2013, prospective opponents began to float questions about his place of birth. The Texas senator immediately declared himself a natural-born citizen. Eventually, just to play it safe, he renounced his birthright Canadian citizenship. At the time, I wrote in The Washington Spectator that Cruz was hoping to inoculate himself for the upcoming presidential race. Though I’m a political consultant and researcher, not an attorney, I concluded that while there is a mountain of reasons to vote against Cruz, claiming he is Canadian is a dead end, because the senator met a “natural born” citizen test. The Canadian birth question had been almost forgotten—until Trump asked, “Are we so sure about that?” With a bit of help from the media, the discussion came roaring back into the public eye. In fact, the media fell so hard for Trump’s pitch that even The Washington Post’s KidsPost—a news source geared to the middle school set—declared that “a court might have to decide” if Cruz can be president. Courts are deciding and dismissing lawsuits without ruling on the merits. But the question remains: are there merits? The short answer is absolutely not. Cruz’s status is no different than Obama’s, McCain’s, Mitt Romney’s—or Mitt’s father George, who, after serving in Nixon’s cabinet, briefly ran for the presidency in 1968 even though he was born in Mexico. What changed is the arrival of Donald Trump, who’s a genius at manipulating both message and media. Trump has made sure that doubts about Cruz’s citizenship will linger, perhaps peeling off 10,000 votes here or there among voters who buy Trump’s claim, as disingenuous as it is. How disingenuous? Remember the debate in July, when Trump referenced a Boston Globe op-ed by liberal jurist Laurence Tribe that had “raised serious questions” about Cruz’s citizenship? Tribe had consistently argued that Ted Cruz is not only American, but a “natural born citizen.” Yet Tribe also observed that it is Ted Cruz’s originalist friends who say he can’t be president. Tribe understands the legal concepts behind “originalism” better than most conservatives. Under Tribe’s (and almost every other legal scholar’s) interpretation of the Constitution, there is no doubt that Cruz is a natural-born American. But as Tribe’s article pointed out, Cruz and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, among others, have professed a devout faith in a “pure originalist doctrine,” which has inspired a lot of angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments over what the founders meant when they invented the term “natural born.” To borrow a phrase from Justice Scalia, conservatives abandoned common sense to argle-bargle a few legal notions to conclude Cruz can’t be president. If you read the hot mess that is Article II, Section I of the Constitution, it seems incredible that the founders didn’t think all this through. (You can learn more about that here.) But remember—the Constitution was a blueprint for a system of government that didn’t exist yet. So when several delegates demanded language to protect us from foreign threats, the drafters slapped down some confusing legalese they lifted from British legal sources that defined who was a “subject of His Majesty’s Crown.” Like Trump followers today, a few of the founders had an irrational dread of immigrants, particularly foreigners who might seize the U.S. government. To be fair, foreign leaders seizing countries was a legitimate concern back in the 18th century. After Tribe’s op-ed, law historian Mary Brigid McManamon concluded in a Washington Post op-ed that while  Senator Cruz is unquestionably American through “blood rights,” he is not truly “natural-born.” Rather, he is in a legal hybrid category known as “naturalized at birth.” Most legal scholars will reject McManamon’s claim on the grounds of equal rights. For centuries England extended “natural born” status on sons born overseas to British fathers. The United States adopted similar laws, granting natural-born status to the sons of overseas American fathers, while sons of mothers married to foreigners could only be “naturalized at birth.” Which brings us back to George Romney. Born in 1907 in Mexico, Romney’s Mormon father and his three wives (there was a reason the elder Romney fled America) were all natural-born Americans. So, when the issue of George Romney’s birth came up in 1968, legal scholars and even the Congressional Research Service, concluded Romney was a natural-born American. Ted Cruz is George Romney’s mirror image: if it had been Cruz’s mother who was the naturalized Cuban-American, while his dad was Delaware-born “Ralph Welcome Cross” instead of “Rafael Bienvenido Cruz,” the senator would have automatically made the natural-born club. That is why legal scholars now say that it is impossible to imagine that any federal court would rule that American males would today have more rights than a natural-born American female. But none of this matters because Cruz’s case will never be heard in court. After dozens of rulings in lawsuits involving both George and Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Barack Obama, the federal courts have effectively declared no citizen has any standing to sue a candidate over presidential eligibility. Lawsuits challenging Cruz’s eligibility—filed in Florida, New York, Alabama, Illinois, Texas, and Pennsylvania—are going nowhere. The suits in New York, Florida, and Illinois have been tossed out. On March 10, a state judge in Harrisburg heard arguments on a similar case and said he will present his ruling soon. Not that the Cruz birthers will give it up; it’s part of Trump’s “Real White Americans vs. the Aliens” politics. And he’s learned that it works. Recall that in 2000, Trump briefly ran for the Reform Party nomination, even contesting the California primary, where he lost by almost two to one.  Back then the Donald was the opposite of the personality we see today. He wanted voters to support his plans for universal health care and tax reform that cut rates for the middle class while raising them on the wealthy. As part of that effort, Trump made his now notorious appearance on “Meet The Press,” where he declared himself a liberal who supported abortion rights. Because the Reform Party self-destructed in 2000, most of us never saw “Wonky Trump”—savaged by leftists who split from the Reform Party to back Ralph Nader and outflanked on the right by Pat Buchanan, who received standing ovations declaring White America under attack by hordes of Mexican immigrants and asserting that his first act as president would be to send troops to seal off the Mexican border, with orders to shoot anyone trying to cross. Trump today is all about “testicular fortitude,” not real policy. His only issue is protecting “us” from the dreaded “them”—to that end, he transformed his chief rival, Ted Cruz, into an alien. This article was first published by the Washington Spectator

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Robert Reich: The GOP is shirking its constitutional responsibility

The Constitution of the United States is clear: Article II Section 2 says the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint … judges to the Supreme Court.” It doesn’t say the President can’t appoint in the final year of his term of office. In fact, a third of all U.S. presidents have appointed a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Yet many Republicans argue that no appointment can be made in the election year. And the Constitution doesn’t give the Senate leader the right to delay and obstruct the rest of the Senate fro voting on a President’s nominee. Yet this is what the current Republican leadership argues. In refusing to vote or even hold a hearing on the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the GOP is abdicating its constitutional responsibility. It’s not doing its job. Senate Republicans are trying to justify their refusal by referring to a comment Joe Biden made when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, urging then-President Bush to hold off on nominating a Supreme Court justice until after the election. But Biden was speaking hypothetically – there was no nominee before the Senate at that time – and he concluded by saying that if the President were to nominate someone he was sure the Senate and the President could come to an agreement. This fight has huge implications. A new Supreme Court justice might be able to reverse “Citizens United” and remove the poison of big money from our democracy. It might reverse “Shelby v. Holder,” and resurrect the Voting Rights Act. And think of the cases coming up – on retaining a woman’s right to choose, on the rights of teachers and other public employees to unionize, on the President’s authority to fight climate change, and the rights of countless Americans with little or no power in a system where more and more power is going to the top. That’s the traditional role of the Supreme Court – to protect the powerless from the powerful. Which is exactly why the Republicans don’t want to fulfill their constitutional responsibility and allow a vote on the President’s nominee. So what can you do? There’s only one response – the same response you made when Republicans shut down the government because they didn’t get their way over the debt ceiling: You let them know they’ll be held accountable. Public pressure is the only way to get GOP senators to release their choke hold on the Supreme Court. Public pressure is up to you. Call your senators now, and tell them you want them to do their job. The Constitution of the United States is clear: Article II Section 2 says the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint … judges to the Supreme Court.” It doesn’t say the President can’t appoint in the final year of his term of office. In fact, a third of all U.S. presidents have appointed a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Yet many Republicans argue that no appointment can be made in the election year. And the Constitution doesn’t give the Senate leader the right to delay and obstruct the rest of the Senate fro voting on a President’s nominee. Yet this is what the current Republican leadership argues. In refusing to vote or even hold a hearing on the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the GOP is abdicating its constitutional responsibility. It’s not doing its job. Senate Republicans are trying to justify their refusal by referring to a comment Joe Biden made when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, urging then-President Bush to hold off on nominating a Supreme Court justice until after the election. But Biden was speaking hypothetically – there was no nominee before the Senate at that time – and he concluded by saying that if the President were to nominate someone he was sure the Senate and the President could come to an agreement. This fight has huge implications. A new Supreme Court justice might be able to reverse “Citizens United” and remove the poison of big money from our democracy. It might reverse “Shelby v. Holder,” and resurrect the Voting Rights Act. And think of the cases coming up – on retaining a woman’s right to choose, on the rights of teachers and other public employees to unionize, on the President’s authority to fight climate change, and the rights of countless Americans with little or no power in a system where more and more power is going to the top. That’s the traditional role of the Supreme Court – to protect the powerless from the powerful. Which is exactly why the Republicans don’t want to fulfill their constitutional responsibility and allow a vote on the President’s nominee. So what can you do? There’s only one response – the same response you made when Republicans shut down the government because they didn’t get their way over the debt ceiling: You let them know they’ll be held accountable. Public pressure is the only way to get GOP senators to release their choke hold on the Supreme Court. Public pressure is up to you. Call your senators now, and tell them you want them to do their job. The Constitution of the United States is clear: Article II Section 2 says the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint … judges to the Supreme Court.” It doesn’t say the President can’t appoint in the final year of his term of office. In fact, a third of all U.S. presidents have appointed a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Yet many Republicans argue that no appointment can be made in the election year. And the Constitution doesn’t give the Senate leader the right to delay and obstruct the rest of the Senate fro voting on a President’s nominee. Yet this is what the current Republican leadership argues. In refusing to vote or even hold a hearing on the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the GOP is abdicating its constitutional responsibility. It’s not doing its job. Senate Republicans are trying to justify their refusal by referring to a comment Joe Biden made when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, urging then-President Bush to hold off on nominating a Supreme Court justice until after the election. But Biden was speaking hypothetically – there was no nominee before the Senate at that time – and he concluded by saying that if the President were to nominate someone he was sure the Senate and the President could come to an agreement. This fight has huge implications. A new Supreme Court justice might be able to reverse “Citizens United” and remove the poison of big money from our democracy. It might reverse “Shelby v. Holder,” and resurrect the Voting Rights Act. And think of the cases coming up – on retaining a woman’s right to choose, on the rights of teachers and other public employees to unionize, on the President’s authority to fight climate change, and the rights of countless Americans with little or no power in a system where more and more power is going to the top. That’s the traditional role of the Supreme Court – to protect the powerless from the powerful. Which is exactly why the Republicans don’t want to fulfill their constitutional responsibility and allow a vote on the President’s nominee. So what can you do? There’s only one response – the same response you made when Republicans shut down the government because they didn’t get their way over the debt ceiling: You let them know they’ll be held accountable. Public pressure is the only way to get GOP senators to release their choke hold on the Supreme Court. Public pressure is up to you. Call your senators now, and tell them you want them to do their job. The Constitution of the United States is clear: Article II Section 2 says the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint … judges to the Supreme Court.” It doesn’t say the President can’t appoint in the final year of his term of office. In fact, a third of all U.S. presidents have appointed a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Yet many Republicans argue that no appointment can be made in the election year. And the Constitution doesn’t give the Senate leader the right to delay and obstruct the rest of the Senate fro voting on a President’s nominee. Yet this is what the current Republican leadership argues. In refusing to vote or even hold a hearing on the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the GOP is abdicating its constitutional responsibility. It’s not doing its job. Senate Republicans are trying to justify their refusal by referring to a comment Joe Biden made when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, urging then-President Bush to hold off on nominating a Supreme Court justice until after the election. But Biden was speaking hypothetically – there was no nominee before the Senate at that time – and he concluded by saying that if the President were to nominate someone he was sure the Senate and the President could come to an agreement. This fight has huge implications. A new Supreme Court justice might be able to reverse “Citizens United” and remove the poison of big money from our democracy. It might reverse “Shelby v. Holder,” and resurrect the Voting Rights Act. And think of the cases coming up – on retaining a woman’s right to choose, on the rights of teachers and other public employees to unionize, on the President’s authority to fight climate change, and the rights of countless Americans with little or no power in a system where more and more power is going to the top. That’s the traditional role of the Supreme Court – to protect the powerless from the powerful. Which is exactly why the Republicans don’t want to fulfill their constitutional responsibility and allow a vote on the President’s nominee. So what can you do? There’s only one response – the same response you made when Republicans shut down the government because they didn’t get their way over the debt ceiling: You let them know they’ll be held accountable. Public pressure is the only way to get GOP senators to release their choke hold on the Supreme Court. Public pressure is up to you. Call your senators now, and tell them you want them to do their job. The Constitution of the United States is clear: Article II Section 2 says the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint … judges to the Supreme Court.” It doesn’t say the President can’t appoint in the final year of his term of office. In fact, a third of all U.S. presidents have appointed a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Yet many Republicans argue that no appointment can be made in the election year. And the Constitution doesn’t give the Senate leader the right to delay and obstruct the rest of the Senate fro voting on a President’s nominee. Yet this is what the current Republican leadership argues. In refusing to vote or even hold a hearing on the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the GOP is abdicating its constitutional responsibility. It’s not doing its job. Senate Republicans are trying to justify their refusal by referring to a comment Joe Biden made when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, urging then-President Bush to hold off on nominating a Supreme Court justice until after the election. But Biden was speaking hypothetically – there was no nominee before the Senate at that time – and he concluded by saying that if the President were to nominate someone he was sure the Senate and the President could come to an agreement. This fight has huge implications. A new Supreme Court justice might be able to reverse “Citizens United” and remove the poison of big money from our democracy. It might reverse “Shelby v. Holder,” and resurrect the Voting Rights Act. And think of the cases coming up – on retaining a woman’s right to choose, on the rights of teachers and other public employees to unionize, on the President’s authority to fight climate change, and the rights of countless Americans with little or no power in a system where more and more power is going to the top. That’s the traditional role of the Supreme Court – to protect the powerless from the powerful. Which is exactly why the Republicans don’t want to fulfill their constitutional responsibility and allow a vote on the President’s nominee. So what can you do? There’s only one response – the same response you made when Republicans shut down the government because they didn’t get their way over the debt ceiling: You let them know they’ll be held accountable. Public pressure is the only way to get GOP senators to release their choke hold on the Supreme Court. Public pressure is up to you. Call your senators now, and tell them you want them to do their job.

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Saying “Hillary only won the Confederacy” isn’t just idiotic — it’s also bad for the Democratic Party

Earlier this week, the activist group Progressive Democrats of America sent out an email in which it tried to downplay Hillary Clinton’s primary victories by noting she has “won the Confederacy” while the rest of the country is “primed to go for Bernie.” This was an awkward attempt to make the case for not giving up on the Bernie Sanders campaign despite Clinton’s almost insurmountable lead in pledged delegates. The race, this line of thinking goes, is now moving on to western states where Sanders has enormous support. A few significant victories, and he could be right back in it. The backlash to the letter was swift. Detractors pointed out that, for starters, it's not true -- unless Massachusetts, Illinois and Ohio are now considered part of the Confederacy. Also, the argument elided the widely reported fact that Clinton owes a great deal of the margin of her victories in Southern states to African American voters, a group traditionally not, to put it mildly, great supporters of the explicit white-supremacist ideology associated with the Confederacy. That word itself has become shorthand for the voting advantages enjoyed by the majority-white Republican Party in the South. Tying it to wins involving a large share of the African-American vote is silly. The PDA quickly apologized. In truth, however, the organization was parroting an argument I’ve seen made by scattered Sanders fans on social media over the last few weeks. (Note: I am not saying Sanders himself is responsible for his supporters' dumb comments, implying Hillary is winning with the votes of unreconstructed Confederates, nor that he and his fans are racists. PLEASE DON'T @ ME!) It has taken a couple of different forms – sometimes the claim substitutes “red states” for “Southern states” – but the implication is always the same: Hillary Clinton is winning states that no Democrat will win in the general election, So we shouldn’t assume they reflect a wider base of support for her in the country. As an argument about who the Democrats should nominate, this is a supremely dumb one. This is a primary election. The issue of whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders is better suited to win, say, Alabama in the general election is not the question that is up for debate. But there is a wider issue here, of which this dust-up is just an example, and that is the tendency of Democrats and left-of-center voters to throw up our hands and sneer at the South when it comes to talk of a voting coalition, or just about anything else. Call it the “Fuck the South” reflex. Now, “Fuck the South” is an understandable reaction when one reads about old Confederate states like Texas and North Carolina taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act to make it harder for blacks and other minorities to vote. It’s understandable when we see Southerners flipping out over the removal of Confederate flags from the grounds of state capitol buildings. It’s understandable that the stain of its resistance to ending slavery, its Jim Crow laws, its incubation of the Ku Klux Klan, would give the South a reputation it cannot overcome. I get it. I grew up in southeastern Virginia and still often drive past the Confederate memorial in the middle of my hometown’s downtown area when I go back for a visit. The fact that there are roads and schools down there named after Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee is to the region’s eternal shame, at least until is renames them. Even if that happens, we will probably always stereotype the South for being filled with slow-witted backwoods hillbillies forever strumming their banjos and shouting “Squeal like a piggie!” at unsuspecting lost canoeists. But the refusal to take the South seriously as a source of electoral power for Democrats is to the party’s detriment. We hear this every election cycle, and in between election cycles, from loyal Democrats who live in states that are so deeply red we might as well write their Electoral College votes into the totals for Republican candidates for every presidential race for the foreseeable future. We hear complaints that even the national Democratic Party won’t commit enough resources to Southern states because they have long since given up on making inroads there. That Progressive Democrats of America would make this argument is supremely ironic. The organization was founded in part by remnants of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. It was Dean who, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, later pushed the party to adopt the “fifty-state strategy” for elections. This strategy was predicated in part on the idea that putting resources even into states that were unwinnable in a presidential election might at least lead to gains for Democrats at the local and state levels. This would be a hugely important step for gaining more progressive governance at the federal level down the road as well, since so many state politicians go on to Congress. Republicans understand this dynamic very well. Which is one reason why they now control the majority of state houses and governor's mansions. But beyond that, not saying “Who cares about Clinton’s wins, they’re in the Confederacy anyway” is simply good team-building. Does the left really want to tell Democrats trapped behind enemy lines, sorry, your vote for your preferred party candidate means less because you’re in a Southern state that no Democrat can win, or living in the Confederacy means you’re probably a conservative white Democrat, so screw you? So be nice to Southern Democrats, even if they do vote for Hillary Clinton. You’re still going to want them on your team down the road.Earlier this week, the activist group Progressive Democrats of America sent out an email in which it tried to downplay Hillary Clinton’s primary victories by noting she has “won the Confederacy” while the rest of the country is “primed to go for Bernie.” This was an awkward attempt to make the case for not giving up on the Bernie Sanders campaign despite Clinton’s almost insurmountable lead in pledged delegates. The race, this line of thinking goes, is now moving on to western states where Sanders has enormous support. A few significant victories, and he could be right back in it. The backlash to the letter was swift. Detractors pointed out that, for starters, it's not true -- unless Massachusetts, Illinois and Ohio are now considered part of the Confederacy. Also, the argument elided the widely reported fact that Clinton owes a great deal of the margin of her victories in Southern states to African American voters, a group traditionally not, to put it mildly, great supporters of the explicit white-supremacist ideology associated with the Confederacy. That word itself has become shorthand for the voting advantages enjoyed by the majority-white Republican Party in the South. Tying it to wins involving a large share of the African-American vote is silly. The PDA quickly apologized. In truth, however, the organization was parroting an argument I’ve seen made by scattered Sanders fans on social media over the last few weeks. (Note: I am not saying Sanders himself is responsible for his supporters' dumb comments, implying Hillary is winning with the votes of unreconstructed Confederates, nor that he and his fans are racists. PLEASE DON'T @ ME!) It has taken a couple of different forms – sometimes the claim substitutes “red states” for “Southern states” – but the implication is always the same: Hillary Clinton is winning states that no Democrat will win in the general election, So we shouldn’t assume they reflect a wider base of support for her in the country. As an argument about who the Democrats should nominate, this is a supremely dumb one. This is a primary election. The issue of whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders is better suited to win, say, Alabama in the general election is not the question that is up for debate. But there is a wider issue here, of which this dust-up is just an example, and that is the tendency of Democrats and left-of-center voters to throw up our hands and sneer at the South when it comes to talk of a voting coalition, or just about anything else. Call it the “Fuck the South” reflex. Now, “Fuck the South” is an understandable reaction when one reads about old Confederate states like Texas and North Carolina taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act to make it harder for blacks and other minorities to vote. It’s understandable when we see Southerners flipping out over the removal of Confederate flags from the grounds of state capitol buildings. It’s understandable that the stain of its resistance to ending slavery, its Jim Crow laws, its incubation of the Ku Klux Klan, would give the South a reputation it cannot overcome. I get it. I grew up in southeastern Virginia and still often drive past the Confederate memorial in the middle of my hometown’s downtown area when I go back for a visit. The fact that there are roads and schools down there named after Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee is to the region’s eternal shame, at least until is renames them. Even if that happens, we will probably always stereotype the South for being filled with slow-witted backwoods hillbillies forever strumming their banjos and shouting “Squeal like a piggie!” at unsuspecting lost canoeists. But the refusal to take the South seriously as a source of electoral power for Democrats is to the party’s detriment. We hear this every election cycle, and in between election cycles, from loyal Democrats who live in states that are so deeply red we might as well write their Electoral College votes into the totals for Republican candidates for every presidential race for the foreseeable future. We hear complaints that even the national Democratic Party won’t commit enough resources to Southern states because they have long since given up on making inroads there. That Progressive Democrats of America would make this argument is supremely ironic. The organization was founded in part by remnants of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. It was Dean who, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, later pushed the party to adopt the “fifty-state strategy” for elections. This strategy was predicated in part on the idea that putting resources even into states that were unwinnable in a presidential election might at least lead to gains for Democrats at the local and state levels. This would be a hugely important step for gaining more progressive governance at the federal level down the road as well, since so many state politicians go on to Congress. Republicans understand this dynamic very well. Which is one reason why they now control the majority of state houses and governor's mansions. But beyond that, not saying “Who cares about Clinton’s wins, they’re in the Confederacy anyway” is simply good team-building. Does the left really want to tell Democrats trapped behind enemy lines, sorry, your vote for your preferred party candidate means less because you’re in a Southern state that no Democrat can win, or living in the Confederacy means you’re probably a conservative white Democrat, so screw you? So be nice to Southern Democrats, even if they do vote for Hillary Clinton. You’re still going to want them on your team down the road.

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Stop medicalizing female desire: Here’s what the scientific breakthroughs in sex science still don’t tell us about women

On the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015, flibanserin was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a viable treatment option for premenopausal women struggling with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD). A non-hormonal pill that must be taken daily, flibanserin—marketed as Addyi—is said to be the cure for those who have problems with low libido.

So why aren't sexuality professionals collectively losing their shit over flibanserin, throwing confetti into the air and twerking around their offices? Because in reality, there is no clear measurement for what, exactly, constitutes "low" libido.

You've probably read a bit about this already: the fact that no one really knows what it means to have normal levels of desire, arousal or orgasm. What makes a person's levels of arousal or desire "abnormal"? How much desire should you be feeling? Low in relation to whom? And what are doctors treating, exactly? Is female sexual dysfunction (FSD) really a disease, or is it just a natural response to life? When desire can shift from day to day because you are distracted by your to-do list, because you're annoyed with your partner, because you feel fat, because you're feeling blue, how can you even determine what's normal for you, let alone for women in general? When desire naturally ebbs as you grow older, or as you take on more responsibility, how can you know how horny you're supposed to be right now?

Because there are no clear answers to any of these questions, some sexuality professionals accuse those in the pharmaceutical industry of medicalizing what, for many, are just the natural ups and downs of life. And in Ray Moynihan, Ph.D.'s "Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals," Kinsey Institute research scientist Erick Janssen, Ph.D., is quoted as saying about the lack of clear measurement tools with which to define FSD, "It's like using a ruler without marks."

So where are these allegedly deficient measurement tools coming from? In many cases, their development is being funded by the pharmaceutical industry, or managed by doctors who are financially beholden to pharmaceutical companies. After all, a drug can't be approved for treatment until there is a way to evaluate its efficacy. And you can't evaluate its efficacy if the condition or disease it's meant to treat does not have an official metric for diagnosis. So researchers have been tasked with finding and defining the line between normal and abnormal. And in order to do this, they have been forced to experiment with a large variety of technological tools in order to figure out the best way of measuring a woman's sexual functioning.

They've tested blood flow to the clitoris, effectively equating a lack of female arousal with erectile dysfunction (ED). This is, after all, how Viagra works—by increasing blood flow to the penis—so why wouldn't a female version be just as effective? It makes sense but, as highlighted in the most recent update of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), physical arousal and sexual desire—while being two distinct aspects of sexual response—are still intertwined in a way that makes them impossible to separate from each other.

They've tested the levels of various hormones in the blood, including testosterone and estrogen. After all, these hormone levels can affect one's sex drive. It makes sense but, in reality, our hormone levels fluctuate over time, and even from day to day. It's a natural part of life. So it's tough to determine how big of a factor these hormones really are.

They've even looked at the brain. One brain imaging study, for example, shows that women who complain about low desire demonstrate different patterns of brain activation in response to sexual stimuli relative to women who do not report feeling distressed by low sexual desire. These results are intriguing in that they suggest that women who self-diagnose as having HSDD may process sexual stimuli differently than women without HSDD. This is the type of research behind drugs such as flibanserin, which target brain chemistry. But research has also shown that drugs such as these have thus far only had a modest effect on women's sexual experiences.

In conducting all of these studies, researchers have used ultrasound machines. They've pressed probes against the clitoris and developed high-tech tampons in order to see what's going on inside the vagina when a woman becomes aroused. They've used clips that take the temperature of the labia and they've used scans to find abnormalities in the brain.

But none of these tools and none of these studies have really been able to get at the complexity of female sexual response. This is because they overstate the importance of physical factors while continuing to ignore the psychological and social factors that can contribute to lower sexual functioning. After all, it's easier to fix a mechanical problem—in much the way Viagra combats erectile dysfunction—than it is to really dig deep and pinpoint all of the interlocking, underlying causes of a lack of desire. Tests such as these are often designed to find that quick fix. And because of this, they still haven't helped researchers establish a baseline level for "normal."

Which is perhaps why so many researchers have turned to psychometrics, a means of psychological measurement. In developing assessment instruments such as questionnaires, researchers are hoping they can get women to reveal more about their experiences with sexual arousal and desire.

But even this can be difficult to get right, as any instrument developed for use in clinical trials must prove to be both reliable and valid. In developing a questionnaire, researchers must first define what it is they want to measure. In the case of various forms of FSD, this means researching all of the factors that influence a woman's sexual functioning. Once these characteristics have been pinpointed, researchers must then consider how best to measure them. After that, questions are drawn up and then tested within large groups of people. Depending upon how these tests go, the questionnaire may have to be refined further.

Many questionnaires have been developed in this way, all with the intention of running clinical trials on new drugs, and on diagnosing women with FSD. And these questionnaires continue to be developed as none of them, apparently, have been able to deliver satisfactory answers on the true nature of FSD.

And maybe that's because—even in the case of psychometrics—questions tend to focus on the physical.

Out of these limitations have sprung numerous analyses of the existing measurement tools, with researchers trying to parse out what works, what doesn't, and why. In 2010, for example, in a comprehensive analysis of various sexual arousal measurement tools, researchers examined how often self-reported and genital measures of sexual arousal were in agreement with each other. "The human sexual response is a dynamic combination of cognitive, emotional, and physiological processes," the authors eventually write. "The degree to which one product of these processes, the individual's experience of sexual arousal, corresponds with physiological activity is a matter of interest to many researchers and practitioners in sexology because subjective experience (or self-report) and genital measures of sexual arousal do not always agree." More recent reviews have only emphasized the need for further research into healthy sexual functioning, and the development of one standardized tool that can be used by both researchers and health care professionals.

So what might the ideal tool look like? How can one measure something as complex and ever-shifting as female sexual response? Sexuality researcher Kristen Mark, Ph.D, M.P.H., is trying to figure that out. Mark and her colleagues are developing yet another tool for diagnostic and research purposes, a scale that measures sexual desire as something that varies from day to day, and from partner to partner. This scale will hopefully prove effective in measuring both spontaneous and responsive desire, and the ways in which it can shift over time. "By acknowledging that sexual desire is multifaceted," she says, "we can begin to use treatment approaches that are catered to each individual."

When asked how one can measure or manage sexual functioning when it is something that shifts so often, Mark says that that her aim is to develop a tool that "examines sexual desire as a state, rather than a trait." This is something she hopes to achieve by incorporating information on a whole spectrum of sexual experiences as they occur from day to day, and from event to event. "It is meant to get at the nuances of sexual desire in a way that prior measurement tools of sexual desire have not aimed to assess," she says.

And Mark isn't the only one looking for new tools and new answers. Ellen Laan, Ph.D., for example, has been researching female sexual functioning for years, and has even worked on developing a device that simultaneously measures pelvic floor activity and genital response, so as to learn more about genital pain disorders such as dyspareunia. She continues to research desire, looking closely at the many things that make us want to rip off our clothes or, conversely, keep them on.

In a paper on the creation of female sexual dysfunction, Leonore Tiefer, Ph.D., writes that "the public finds medicalization attractive" because the ability to look to a scientific solution is much simpler than looking at everything else that might contribute to sexual dissatisfaction. If there is no chemical imbalance in your brain, if your vagina's not broken, if you can't pop a pill to wipe away the difficulties you experience in the bedroom, then what can you do?

How can you measure the hurt you feel on a day your partner makes you angry? How can you measure the levels of distraction that have you paying attention to the dust bunnies in the corner or the jiggle of your belly or the to-do list in your head instead of that naked person lying next to you? How much weight should you give to your chronic depression, to your prescribed medications, to recent grief, to all of the things that can put a dent in your desire?

There is no doubt that some women experience true distress at what they see as a deficiency in their libido. And it would be doing these women a disservice to dismiss their frustration, especially considering the medical field's history of gender bias and delayed diagnosis where it comes to health issues that have not been well researched, and which are not well understood.

But if there is to be a true solution to the struggle women endure in the bedroom, it likely won't be found while developing another one-dimensional fix. Instead, it must be sought out by looking at women's intimate lives from every angle, and by acknowledging that a multi-pronged approach is the best one.

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