Is Donald Trump A Quisling?

Trump is taking his own sweet time in putting together the keystone kabinet, but it is already shaping up to be a gang of incompetents, corporate stooges, and war mongers to warm the heart of any Republican.  And there are even a few woman-beaters and Putin groupies in the mix.  (And there are a lot of homohysterics—more on that in another post.)  But all is not well in Trumpland.

     The GOP is already gearing up for an internal battle over Trump’s connections with Putin, Russian interference in the election, and the appointment of people who seem entirely too favorable to Russian interests.  John McCain is way out front on this, but other Republicans are gradually stiffening up their spines to raise questions.  I think this will make Congress rather less tractable than Trump imagines.  Indeed, it may do more than that; it may bring about the end of the GOP as we know it.

     Several years ago, George Will argued in a column that the GOP had to continue its opposition to abortion because that is all it really stood for anymore.  These days, I would argue that the Republican Party stands for many things—racism, woman-hating, homohysteria, anti-science goofery, war, and, the glue that holds it all together, corporate stoogery.  (Will, to his credit, has left the GOP.)  Be that as it may, I think it is safe to say that one theme, at least, has been consistent in the GOP for several decades—staunch opposition to authoritarian communism.  

     Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, for all that one was a crook and the other a confused old man who didn’t know what was going on, were adamant in their opposition to the USSR and the authoritarian regimes it spawned.  Nixon’s consistent anti-communism made it politically possible for him to initiate a change in our relations with China, and now China is the third largest market for US exports.  Reagan is popular in part because he is viewed as bringing the conflict between capitalism and communism to a successful conclusion.  

     But what of the rest of us?  If there really has been a significant Russian effort to influence the election by propaganda, computer intrusions, and other covert means, this surely offsets the pleasure of watching the GOP get what they’ve got coming.  This sort of meddling, even if it was unsuccessful, would constitute an attack on the country just as serious as a missile attack or a naval incursion into US territory.  An unsuccessful attack is still an attack, and the attacker is still our enemy.  As John Locke wisely said, nations can be in a state of war with one another even when they are not actively shooting.

     But suppose that the investigation initiated by President Obama, or the one that Congress is likely to launch soon, uncovers evidence that Trump was (is) complicit in this meddling.  (As I read the situation, this is not merely an idle supposition.)  And what of McConnell’s insistence on suppressing this intelligence?  Is this treason?  High crimes and misdemeanors?  

     The real danger here is in the damage that this is doing to our political culture.  Many Americans (many, many) are primed simply not to recognize the legitimacy of the incoming administration.  This is not simply frustration at losing an election to what they see as an inferior candidate; it is deep conviction that Trump is profoundly unfit to lead and that he did not win the election lawfully.  And every day, Trump speaks and acts to deepen this conviction.

     And now, it seems, some parts of our government—intelligence agencies, some members of Congress—are coming to share this conviction.   Perhaps the winds of constitutional crisis are gathering.

Moral Equivalency

The argument is making the rounds that the folks protesting Trump’s victory and Clinton’s defeat are no different from the people who protested Obama’s election and refused to accept him as President.  This is generally understood to be not just a factual description, but rather a claim of some sort of moral equivalence.  Since it seems likely that the protests are going to go on for awhile, it seems worthwhile to examine this argument.

This sort of moral equivalency argument is not uncommon; for example, critics of US foreign policy will sometimes argue that our imprisoning and torturing and murdering and bombing and such are no better than that of our opponents.  Many people see a practical implication in this equivalence:  we should stop, lest we be simply hypocrites, or worse.  

This sort of argument can be quite persuasive.  Hypocrisy is a common, perhaps even universal political vice; for example, our last three presidents, potheads all, have seen fit to continue and even escalate the war on pot smokers.  And a central purpose of terrorism is to make people and nations behave in ways that make them no better than the terrorists.  It is not entirely implausible to argue that this strategy is working out pretty nicely for the terrorists these days. 

So, what about the moral equivalence of the protests against Obama and those against Trump?  That depends, I think, on how you view the following.  Obama and Clinton both put forth positive visions for the country, along with plans to achieve those visions.  Obama might have had secret plans to put white people in FEMA camps and take all their guns, but he didn’t campaign on this.  Clinton was certainly a corrupt politician, but she didn’t put this forward as a qualification.  (Full disclosure:  I didn’t agree with Clinton on most policy issues, and I was rather surprised that Obama apparently had no notion how actually to get anything done.)

Trump also presented a vision of the country’s future, one in which racism and sexism and religious intolerance figured prominently, and that he apparently planned to achieve by exhorting his followers to violence.  

Does this mean that the protests against Trump are (morally) different from those against Obama?  Does it mean that a vote for Clinton is not a vote for corruption, while a vote for Trump is a vote for racism, sexism, and violence?

I do not know what is in the hearts of protestors and Trump voters.  I do not know who is a racist or sexist, or who is just a sore loser.  But I do know that 50 million Americans voted for a candidate who openly and in the most vulgar manner offered his racism and sexism and religious intolerance as a reason to vote for him.  And having said that, I am not sure what else to say.  

Insurgencies Won and Lost

I find it very interesting that both of the parties faced powerful insurgencies by outsiders this time around.  Bernie Sanders was not a Democrat, a fact that many of his supporters seem to forget when they whine about the party’s treatment of him.  And many of his supporters were at best nominal Democrats, if they were at all.  It reminded me of the McGovern insurgency in 1972, and superdelegates, whether rightly or wrongly, were put in place partly to prevent this sort of thing.  Donald Trump was no sort of Republican until he decided to run for the nomination.  He had always presented himself as a liberal Democrat.  And a good many of his supporters certainly weren’t enthusiastic Republicans, if they were at all.  

The Republicans lost against the insurgency and the Democrats won.  And then….  It seems not at all implausible that really deep disaffection from the two parties that dominate our electoral process tells us a lot about the election and about our political culture.  Lots of people are really, really sick of the GOP and the Democrats.  But no one knows quite what to do, so the Presidency is tossed back and forth, Congress remains dysfunctional, and corporate stoogery is the order of the day.

This kind of radical disaffection is dangerous, of course, as the historians keep telling us.   In the short term, we all need to be really careful, I think.  But from a longer perspective, it seems clear that we have to change the way we do elections.  And it won’t do simply to replace the current two dysfunctional parties with two new ones.  There is no reason to think that the forces which have rendered the two dominant parties dysfunctional will not also cause any new pair to become so.  We need more parties, lots more parties, and that means a new way of doing elections.

A pipe dream, I know.  I expect that four years from now, we will just be four years further down the path we’ve been on since Reagan.  But hey, the time between the election and the inauguration is like the calm before the storm; it’s a good time for a pipe dream.

Why Did Trump Win?

Why Did Trump Win?

Let’s be clear about what the issue is here.  We could have elected a corrupt politician—Clinton is certainly that.  We’ve elected corrupt politicians before, and the republic has survived.  Instead, we elected a professional con artist who makes no pretense of being anything but a racist, sexist pig, who smooches the behind of Vladimir Putin, and who encourages his followers to violence.  Why did we do this to ourselves?

One reason is certainly that white working class people, especially those economists call the working poor, are scared and pissed off.  And rightly so.  They look around and see a system that is run by and for an elite, while their own prospects are grim.  Good jobs, jobs that pay enough to live decently, are disappearing to globalization or automation.  At the same time, massive immigration and sweeping social changes are exerting enormous pressure on their communities.  And if they complain about their falling prospects, they are told that they are responsible for their own misery (by conservatives who are likely corporate stooges) or that they are disgusting racists (by privileged bourgeois liberals who are quite unaffected by these pressures).  Increasingly extreme economic inequality, combined with the self-righteous moralizing of the elites, creates fertile ground for a demagogue.

Another reason, of course, is that some of Trump’s supporters are racists—or sexists or homohysterics, or religious fanatics—people moved by hatred of some other.  For some Americans, Trump is the perfect restorative tonic after eight years of a black president; it is no surprise that the nazis and the white supremacists supported him.  He is the perfect antidote to the threat of a female president.  He is not shackled by political correctness.

And, of course, there is ignorance.  Many people actually seem to believe the incoherent tripe that demagogues like Trump spout—long on promises, short on plans.  I think many Americans are under the sway of the delusion that Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence describe in their 1977 book, The American Monomyth.  If something is going wrong, it can only be because there are bad people doing bad things.  The solution is for a good guy (only one, a solitary hero) to ride in (on a white horse), shoot the bad guys, and then ride off, having returned everything to its natural state of goodness.  Clint Eastwood has made a lot of great movies out of this myth, but it generally doesn’t make for good government.

But why did Clinton lose?  More on that later.