Monday, April 2, 2018

The idiocy of this mindset


Josh Marshall at TPM has posted an excellent column about wrongheaded approaches to "Trump and Trumpism." I recommend that you read the whole thing, but here's a long excerpt:
It is perfectly obvious that President Trump’s long run of personal attacks on Andrew McCabe weren’t driven by his possible unfairness to Hillary Clinton or possible misleading testimony about those actions. Trump’s attacks on McCabe are part of his efforts to attack the FBI in order to discredit the investigation into his campaign’s collusion with Russia and related crimes. McCabe has been a useful target since his wife earlier ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the state legislature in Virginia. That is useful in identifying him as an anti-Trump deep state zealot. Full stop.

The fact that the FBI is an imperfect institution, ran ConIntelPro, surveilled Martin Luther King and a million other things is beside the point. And confusing the point by raising these issues is either dishonest or blinkered. President Trump isn’t trying to even the scales for these past misdeeds. He’s trying to create a system that is dramatically worse.

It is equally clear that low wage warehouse jobs, upending of retail businesses, disintermediation of publishers or tax avoidance are not things Donald Trump cares anything about. Indeed, the one thing he really focuses on with Amazon – Amazon ripping off the Post Office – seems pretty clearly not to be true. Amazon is Trump’s target because of The Washington Post.

Amazon doesn’t own The Washington Post. But it is owned by Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. So close enough. President Trump’s attacks on Amazon are entirely part of his attacks on independent and even mildly critical media. Full stop. ...

But the bigger point is that it’s not really about McCabe or Amazon. Having a sitting President launching scaling [scathing?] personal attacks on a federal law enforcement officer and demanding his firing or imprisonment for personal and political motives is wildly outside the norms that govern the American system. Similarly, a President who routinely threatens prosecutorial or regulatory vengeance against private companies because they are not sufficiently politically subservient to the President personally is entirely outside of our system of governance. At present, Donald Trump is an autocrat without an autocracy. The system mostly resists his demands because it’s not designed to operate that way and we have centuries worth of norms that are remarkably resilient. But systems change. And it’s clear that ours is already starting to change under his malign influence.

When an autocrat imprisons or kills people on his own arbitrary authority, no doubt some of the people are really bad folks. I have zero doubt, for instance, that a lot of the people Saddam Hussein had tortured or killed were just as vicious and awful as he was. We don’t say these were the cases where Saddam actually ‘got it right’ because we are or should be against autocracy and judicial murder in general and on principle. Obviously the stakes at present are less severe for us. But principle is the same. And the stakes are quite high. And putting it this way captures the idiocy of this mindset.

As The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson noted yesterday on Twitter: “Countries in which companies succeed or fail because of their relationship with the leader are poorer, more violent and unstable, more unequal. More everything bad. The U.S. and all nations have always, of course, had some degree of corruption. But not like this.”

The same applies to a President who so commonly disregards the rule of law in regards to individuals or government agencies. Preserving a rule of law political system from sliding into one that is corrupt and autocratic is much more important than the specifics of whether any one company is monopolistic or nefarious or the individual rights and wrongs of what some high level executive at the FBI may or may not have done.

Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to America's democracy. Let's not give him credit for that, even if one thing that he says, or even one thing that he does, isn't entirely wrong, in your mind.

That's how politicians work, anyway. At the very least, it's being gullible to let them get away with it. We have to be smarter than that.

4 comments:

Mary said...

My biggest fear is that he will get re-elected and that WILL be the end of our democracy. His stupid followers don't get it and the future citizens will pay the price. We will become a combination of Russia and some of the fanatical Mid East countries where the press is controlled and religion is the law.

Bill Garthright said...

Well, Mary, he's got nearly three years left even in his first term. And he's still got a 40% approval rating, which is just... unbelievable.

But I'm actually more worried about the Republican Party in general. Trump is a symptom of the GOP, more than he's actually leading it. And yet, they still get support.

Even with a wave election this year, Republicans are likely to hold on to Congress, thanks to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and, in the Senate, the exaggerated political power of rural voters (since each state gets two senators, regardless of population).

And Republicans control most states, which is how they've been able to gerrymander election districts and enact voter suppression policies.

Finally, they control the U.S. Supreme Court - thanks to stealing a Supreme Court pick from the Democrats - and that's likely to get worse, not better. (The most conservative justices are the youngest.)

So, yes, I'm very worried, but not so much that Donald Trump will get re-elected. I'm worried that anyone still votes Republican these days.

I'm worried that a good election for Democrats - and we need a great election - will be followed by the pattern we've been seeing for decades, with liberals either fighting among themselves or deciding that they don't need to bother.

And I'm definitely worried about the next three years!

Mary said...

I agree. The republicans are the three "R" s. Religion, Racism and Revenge. The few people I know who are republicans are rather far right religious, anti anyone who is not white Christian and go along with Trump's revenge against Obama in undoing everything he has done. Then we can throw in anti science and anti environment...in fact anti anything sane and reasonable for the good of humanity and our planet.
I really can't figure out what is wrong with these people. It's something more than stupidity.

jeff725 said...

Good to hear from you again, Bill.

As for the topic at hand....George Carlin, "Dumb Americans:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfuWlB2uP4

That clip has become my new personal manifesto. My cynicism is bordering on misanthropy.