gracchusdixit

During Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, he often responded to our nation’s most dreadful follies—the ceaseless mass shootings, unending displays of racism and prejudice, chest-thumping expressions of mindless nationalism—with the words, “This is not who we are.  We are better than this.”  Coming from a person and a president so rational, so courteous, and so consistently thoughtful, such words provided consolation and hope, in particular, the hope that, despite our lapses, there remained a fundamental decency in the American people that could, and in the end would, prevail over the worst of our instincts and the darkest events in our history.

Given the present awfulness of our public life, I am no longer convinced that Barack Obama’s comforting words any longer apply—or were ever true, to begin with.  Indeed, they seem, in retrospect, to have been rather naive, the words of a man too decent to see the world, and our nation in particular, as they actually are.

It is no longer possible to deny the fact that a criminal occupies the oval office: a man who daily enriches himself, his family, and his cronies at the nation’s expense; a man who betrays his wife by paying other women for sex and paying them off when they threaten to reveal his betrayals; a man whose only concern is his own survival and glorification.

All the while the Republican Party now dominated by this man strives to undermine our legal institutions, the man himself does everything possible to vilify and hobble the free press, the last of our public institutions that seems determined to hold his authoritarian instincts in check.

It is, moreover, undeniably clear that Russia manipulated our last election and is already well on its way to manipulating our next, without having suffered an iota of punishment or retribution. On the contrary, the President of the United States, having benefitted from this manipulation, kowtows obsequiously to that foreign power and would, if he could, forgive it entirely.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of this man’s authoritarian agenda, federal agents are rounding up helpless and innocent immigrants by the thousands, as if they were dangerous felons.  Worse yet, we have shut our doors to the world’s refugees and asylum-seekers, all the while their numbers and desperation grow.  Many of these hapless people owe their fate directly to us, the result of the ineptitude, neglect, and stupidity of our foreign policy, for which our current president refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever.

A tax bill has just been passed and signed that will reward a handful of the richest Americans for their support of Donald Trump and his enablers, a give-away of historic proportions that will be paid for by a staggering addition to the national debt. Ordinary Americans—you and I, our children and grandchildren—will be subsidizing this give-away for decades to come.

A budget has also just been passed that will spend vast and unnecessary sums on our already bloated military, at the expense of one modest domestic program after another.  Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, Public Broadcasting—the list goes on and on—will be slashed to pay for weapons the military does not need and does not even know how to use.  In the last year alone, the Pentagon spent nearly a billion dollars it could not account for.  This lavish waste adds nothing to the safety of the nation.  It merely lines the pockets of the defense contractors who have been fleecing our nation since the end of the Second World War.

Day after day, dozens upon dozens of Trump administration officials either resign or skulk away, striving to avoid scandal or prosecution for corruption, sexual misconduct, or domestic abuse.  The only scoundrel yet immune to this public shaming is, of course, the president himself, whose record of personal and financial misbehavior is bottomless.

Just days ago, yet another American school was devastated by a deranged killer with a gun that no other decent society on the planet would have allowed him to buy.  To this latest gruesome tragedy, our representatives in Congress and our President have nothing to offer but prayers, empty condolences, and meaningless promises of support.  Thanks to the NRA and the gun lobby that funds it, our government will do nothing, yet again.

To all of this, the American people seem to be indifferent, or even worse, approving.  Donald Trump’s ratings have risen.  Despite all historical evidence to the contrary, a majority of the gullible electorate now believe that Republicans are better able to manage the economy.  Just weeks ago, it was assumed by most pundits and prognosticators that a Democratic “wave” was coming in the 2018 mid-term election; that hope has all but evaporated.  In the latest “generic ballot’ polls, Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal.  Absent some unanticipated calamity, it now seems more likely than not that Republicans will retain their control of both houses of Congress in 2018 and that Donald Trump will win reelection in 2020.

So much for the comforting proposition that the American people are “fundamentally decent” and will, in the end, “do the right thing”.  I do not now where “the better angels of our nature” may be spending their time these days, but they seem to have abandoned us.  Whatever we may be, we are not the nation imagined by Barack Obama.

Two days ago, the 2018 World Economic Forum opened in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos.  Once upon a time, Davos was an obscure and rather remote spot, situated roughly where the borders of Switzerland, Italy, and Austria converge.  Thanks to the World Economic Forum, however, it has become famous—so famous that no one any longer uses the formal name of the conclave.  “Davos” is enough.

Founded more than 40 years ago by a German-born professor of business at the University of Geneva, Davos was originally intended to introduce American management practices, then thought to be the global creme della creme, to the supposedly sluggish and backward companies and economies of Europe.  Gradually, Davos morphed into something far more—nothing less than the premier gathering of the global economic elite, where presidents and prime ministers, bankers and CEOs, economists and academics rub shoulders and congratulate one another on their membership in the world’s most exclusive club.  It has become, in effect, the annual convention of the neoliberal economic order, when participants restate, reinforce, and reaffirm their belief in the tenets of global capitalism:  the superiority of so-called “free” markets, the supremacy of so-called “free” trade, and the unfettered freedom of capital to pursue profit wherever profit can be found.

By all accounts, the mood at this year’s meeting is nothing less than euphoric.  Buoyed by the corporate tax cuts recently passed in the United States, the pundits and panjandrums of Davos are predicting an economic boom, not only in America but in the rest of the world.  These expectations will soon be passed down as holy writ to the rest of us by hundreds of sycophantic journalists, who flock to Davos like bees eager to lick up pollen.  To the smug, self-satisfied elite who convene at the World Economic Forum, the only world that matters is their world.

No one expressed this conceit better than the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who, in 1992, published a book called The End of History and the Last Man.  Rare for a work so densely packed with sometimes daunting philosophical and historical ideas, Fukuyama’s magnum opus quickly became an international best seller.  It also became, for a while at least, the neoliberal equivalent of the Communist Manifesto—to wit, the defining text of global capitalism.

Writing just three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued that history had for all intents and purposes come to an end.  What he meant by “history” was the long struggle between the two opposing ideologies of capitalism and socialism.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he claimed, history had declined a winner:  capitalism and the liberal democracies that embraced it were on the road to becoming the universal and permanent economic and political system to which all nations would someday evolve.

From where we sit today, scarcely 20 years after Fukuyama’s screed was published, it is hard to believe that his rosy and confident prognostications were ever taken seriously, let alone treated as gospel—for the social, political, and economic institutions he declared to be triumphant are now everywhere under attack or crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions.  Indeed, Fukuyama himself recanted his views some years ago, candidly admitting that he not only underestimated the fragility of neoliberal institutions but misread the trajectory of history itself.

Fukuyama’s recantation has done little, however, to cause the Davos elite to confront, let alone question, their own assumptions.  As they sip champagne, nibble foie gras crackers, and natter on about Greek debt or the GDP of Uzbekistan, there is little indication that they have even the slightest inkling that their world and the real world are moving in two, radically different directions.

The European Union, which Fukuyama once judged to be the “probable model” for the political future of the planet, is struggling to survive, as some of its most important member states drift toward right-wing authoritarianism.  Germany, the EU’s most important and stable member, finds itself on the razor’s edge, after a Neo-Nazi party won an shockingly large slice of the votes in that country’s most recent elections, and the once indomitable Angela Merkel fights for her political life. A majority of the electorate in the United Kingdom, that phlegmatic bastion of global capitalism, have voted to turn their backs on the European Union altogether, opting instead for ethnic and economic isolation.  Around the globe, tyrants are rising up like dragon’s teeth; the siren song of xenophobic nationalism is drowning out the voices of moderation and tolerance; the rule of law is being discarded as a nettlesome impediment to the will of autocratic leaders.  These include, not only the dictatorial presidents of Russia, Turkey, and the Philippines, but the increasingly authoritarian and lawless President of the United States.

As creative and productive as capitalism undoubtedly can be, it can also, like the Hindu god Siva, be profoundly destructive.  Unfettered capitalism turns citizens into mere consumers.  It uproots social and cultural traditions that are centuries-old.  It transforms human beings into disposable commodities. That citizens and human beings would someday rise up against these depredations was inevitable.  What wasn’t inevitable, what didn’t need to happen, was a turn toward nationalism, racism, and autocracy.

The global elite, as they gather on the empyrean heights of Davos, seem blithely unaware of all the chaos down below.  Like the Roman Emperor Nero, they appear to be fiddling all the while Rome burns.  If they do not soon put aside their fiddling, the conflagration will consume us all.

In 1933, Hannah Arendt, who went on to become a renowned journalist, philosopher, and political thinker, fled Germany, where she had embarked upon what would undoubtedly have been a brilliant academic career, had not Adolf Hitler risen to power.  To escape the all-but-certain prospect of extermination at the hands of the Nazis, she left her native land forever.  She was only 27.

For the next eight years, Arendt moved from one precarious refuge to another:  first to Czechoslovakia, then to Switzerland, thereafter to France.  When, in 1940, the German blitzkrieg swept through the Ardennes and the Valley of the Somme like a massive and pitiless scythe mowing down tender wheat, she was forced to flee again, this time to Lisbon, and eventually, to the United States.

Despite Arendt’s academic and intellectual accomplishments—she had been a prized pupil of the famous philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and had won her PhD at the University of Heidelberg, where she studied under the no less famous Karl Jaspers—Arendt was not given the welcome she deserved when she arrived on our shores.  Our country had been slow to recognize what was happening to the Jews of Europe, and even when that awful reality became inescapably obvious, we remained reluctant to do anything about it.  It was the era of “America First,” a time when many Americans chose to avert their eyes, skirt their moral responsibilities, and turn their backs on the world.

Thus it was that the talented and brilliant Hannah Arendt had to begin all over again, reconstructing the personal life and professional career that had been stolen from her by the cruel vagaries of history.  For the better part of a decade, she endured what amounted to a hand-to-mouth existence, sustaining herself and her family with a series of temporary academic jobs and journalistic assignments.  In 1950, she finally became an American citizen, and, one year later, published her first book.  It was called The Origins of Totalitarianism.

This controversial and influential work changed the trajectory of Arendt’s life and career, catapulting her from relative obscurity to a front row seat among the world’s most consequential political thinkers.  Her book quickly became, and remains, the definitive study of totalitarian political and social regimes.

Never have the insights expressed in that book been more relevant than they are today.  Never has Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of totalitarianism been more acute.  Never have her warnings been so clear, so perceptive, and so frightening.  Here, for example, is her description of the social and psychological conditions that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true…Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.  The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

These words were written nearly three-quarters of a century ago, yet they could have been written yesterday.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more convincing description of the psychological and political malady that now afflicts our nation—a nation held hostage by the political pyrotechnics of Donald Trump and his fascinated “base,” millions of our fellow citizens who are not only willing but eager to accept his lies, to believe in the absurd, to reject truth and facts.   Arendt described such people with chilling clarity:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Those who accepted the outrageous assertion of Donald Trump’s former press secretary that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period;” those who believed Senator Orrin Hatch’s description of Trump as “one of the best presidents, maybe ever;” those who swallowed Trump’s own self-aggrandizing claim that “we’ve done more than perhaps any president in the first 100 days;” all those are “ideal subjects of totalitarian rule”.

Our institutions may be stronger than most, but they are not invincible.  The longer Donald Trump stays in the White House, the longer the self-serving hypocrites in the Republican Party ignore, excuse, or defend his behavior, the more vulnerable and fragile our institutions become.  There is no escaping the fact that a would-be autocrat now sits in the oval office and that millions of Americans are quite content with that result.  To quote the prescient Hannah Arendt one last time:

The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain. 

It is tempting to think that the nightmare of totalitarianism that swept over Germany and Russia cannot plant its roots here, that our Constitution and governing institutions will save us, that we will survive the Trump presidency with those institutions intact and someday return to normalcy.  Such thinking is not only wishful but naïve.  We stand at the edge of a precipice.  To imagine otherwise is worse than naïve, it is fatal.

The Republican Party is about to be granted its most fervent wish, a tax bill that will dramatically reshape the economic and social landscape of the nation.  The only hurdle remaining is for the two separate bills already passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate to be reconciled, whereupon Donald Trump will undoubtedly sign the final bill into law.

No matter what tweaks may be made before this legislation lands on Trump’s desk, it will bring about one of the most dramatic redistributions of wealth in American history.  Most Americans will eventually see their taxes rise, their incomes decline, or both, because of sweeping cuts to a host of programs they depend upon to make ends meet.   On the other hand, corporations and their shareholders will get a windfall; the richest one percent will get a huge tax cut; and the top one tenth of one percent will enjoy nothing less than a bonanza.  The certain result of all this is that the level of economic inequality in our country will become even more grotesque than it already is.

In public, Republicans have justified this financial land-grab by claiming that it will stimulate the economy, raise wages, and pay for itself by increasing the overall tax revenues that will supposedly result from a rising tide of prosperity.  Nobody but an idiot believes this fairy tale, and, although the Republican Party has more than its fair share of idiots, its leaders know better—or at least, they should.

The last major overhaul of our tax code occurred in the 1981, during the Reagan administration, which Republicans have been idolizing ever since. Unfortunately, those cuts, as the Brits say, “came a cropper”.  They neither generated more revenue nor paid for themselves.  On the contrary, the federal deficit doubled, and the national debt tripled.  To right the fiscal ship before it capsized and sank, Reagan reversed course and raised taxes—repeatedly.

In private, many Republicans admit that their desperate urgency to pass this bill has nothing whatever to do with economic results but is, instead, a political calculation.  In their view, the party needs a “win” (any “win” will do), if it is to have any hope of surviving the 2018 mid-term elections.

There are others who say this bill is even more cynical, that it is nothing less than a quid pro quo for the party’s richest donors, who have made their intentions clear:  either cut their taxes or they will shut off the financial spigot.

These various theories of the case undoubtedly contain elements of truth.  But there is another explanation for the Republican Party’s stubborn determination to pass a tax bill that is not only deeply unpopular but likely to hurt them at the polls.  The explanation is that this bill is, in the end, not a question of economics, public policy, or even political calculation; it is an act of pure ideology, an act of condemnation, punishment and retribution.

If there were any doubt on that front, it disappeared this week when two of the most senior Republicans in the Senate inadvertently dropped their masks and revealed their true beliefs.

The first was Chuck Grassley, the Senior Senator from Iowa, who defended the idea of eliminating the estate tax—a change that would benefit a mere two tenths of one percent of Americans—in these words:

I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.

The blatant prejudice underlying that remark was so repugnant that Grassley felt compelled to defend himself.  In the process, he only made matters worse:

My point regarding the estate tax, which has been taken out of context, is that the government shouldn’t seize the fruits of someone’s lifetime of labor after they die.  The question is one of basic fairness, and working to create a tax code that doesn’t penalize frugality, saving, and investment.  That’s as true for family farmers who have to break up their operations to pay the IRS following the death of a loved one as it is for parents saving for their children’s college education or working families investing and saving for their retirement.

Fewer than 100 “family farmers” pay estate taxes in any given year, let alone taxes that require them to “break up their operations”.  The assertion that taxing estates larger than $5 million somehow penalizes “parents saving for their children’s college education or working families investing and saving for their retirement” is simply laughable.  If Chuck Grassley can’t distinguish between “frugality” and egregious wealth, between “working families” and multi-millionaires, it is high time that he stepped aside and made way for someone who can do the math.

The comments of Orrin Hatch, the Senior Senator from Utah and the longest-service Republican in Congress, were even worse.  On the floor of the Senate, he was asked why he wasn’t prepared to continue funding for “CHIP,” a program that helps needy families get insurance for their sick children.  Hatch responded with positive outrage, as if his personal honor had been called into question:

I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.  Unfortunately, the liberal philosophy has created millions of people that way, who believe everything they are or ever hope to be depend on the federal government rather than the opportunity that this great country grants them.

There you have it:  as clear a statement of the cold, cruel ideology of the Republican Party as you are ever likely to find.  After voting for a bill that would borrow two trillion dollars to fund a tax cut for the richest Americans, Orrin Hatch proclaims that he would “have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves”.

Republicans like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch truly believe that the rich deserve their riches and their tax cuts, while the poor do not.  To the likes of Grassley and Hatch, if you are rich, you are ipso facto productive and industrious, a maker rather than a taker.  In their world view, there are no crooked speculators on Wall Street, no bribe-paying billionaires, no lazy, lucky rich kids like Donald Trump’s two witless sons and his sanctimonious daughter.

If, on the other hand, you are poor, sick, or simply down on your luck, you are a lazy taker, who expects “the federal government to do everything,” someone who turns your back on “the opportunity that this great country” has granted you.

Orrin Hatch frequently talks about their humble beginnings, and in Hatch’s case, those beginnings were indeed humble.  But like so many of his fellow Republicans, he seems utterly incapable of understanding that the “opportunity this great country” granted to him was infinitely greater than the opportunity it grants to those of its citizens who don’t happen to be white men.

It is doubtful that Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, or any other Republican member of Congress, for that matter, has spent a day, an hour, or a minute talking to the teachers and kids in a crumbling public school in rural Alabama or Mississippi.  It is unlikely that they have ever walked the streets of East LA or the South Side of Chicago.   It is even less likely that they have bothered to ask themselves why thousands of Americans spend their nights sleeping on sidewalks, on beds made of cardboard boxes, wrapped in rags and old newspapers.  To Republicans, these are not fellow human beings in need of help; they are misfits who “won’t lift a finger” to help themselves and therefore deserve what they get.

After decades of pretense and prevarication, we should be grateful to Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch for dropping their mask at last.  They have revealed the Republic Party to be what it truly is:  soulless, heartless, and cruel.

The allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Roy Moore of Alabama, who is running to take Jeff Sessions’ seat in the United States Senate, are simultaneously loathsome and ironic.  Let’s start with “loathsome.”

Moore is a far-right evangelical, who has called for homosexuality to be criminalized, Muslims to be banned from serving in Congress, and the “word of God” to take precedence over the Bill of Rights.  If Moore had his way, polygamy would become the law of the land, adulterers would be stoned in public, and the occasional first-born child would have its throat cut on a stone altar to appease the whims of the Almighty who glowers over the Old Testament like a cantankerous patient in a South Florida nursing home.

When he was the head of Alabama’s Supreme Court, Moore installed a copy of the Ten Commandments in front of the courthouse.  Federal judges ordered him to remove it, because its presence violated the separation of church and state stipulated by the Constitution.  Moore refused and was removed from office.  This did not stop the good people of Alabama from reelecting him.  In Alabama, supreme court justices aren’t appointed on their intellectual and professional merits; they run for office like politicians, which explains why idiots like Roy Moore end up passing judgment on laws they don’t understand or hold in contempt.

It was therefore no surprise that, soon after his reelection, Moore defied the Supreme Court of the United States, insisting that judges throughout Alabama should continue to enforce the state’s unconstitutional ban on same-sex marriage.  He was thereupon removed from office a second time.

Moore justifies his bad behavior on religious grounds.  He asserts that the dictates of the Judaeo-Christian god must reign supreme over all other laws and political institutions—those dictates being interpreted, of course, by pious Christians like Roy Moore himself.   Throughout his public career, Roy Moore has never tired of pontificating about the “sinful” state of American society.  According to him, virtually everything that ails us, from hurricanes to earthquakes, from diseases to the economic catastrophes, is punishment for a wicked society’s decision to “abandon god”.

Here’s where the irony comes in.

This paragon of moral virtue, this crusader for Judaeo-Christian values, this warrior  against sin, has been accused of sexually molesting a 14-year-old girl when he was a 32-year-old assistant prosecutor in Alabama.  That “girl” is now a mature woman.  Her story has been corroborated by her mother and several friends to whom she confided at the time.  Three other women have come forward to say that Moore made sexual advances to them when they were in their teens, and more than thirty sources have backed up their claims.

The accuser has no apparent ax to grind.  The criminal statute of limitations is long past, and she has filed no civil suit for monetary damages.  There is nothing to suggest that she, or the other women involved, are selfishly motivated.  They did not approach The Washington Post, which told their story; The Washington Post approached them.

Moore has denied these allegations, dismissing them as “fake news,” ginned up by the liberal media and the Democratic Party to derail his personal crusade to save the country from its godless ways:  “We are in the midst of a spiritual battle,” he tweeted, “with those who want to silence our message.”

Moore’s brother compared the accusations to the persecution and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which, to say the very least, is a stretch.  Whatever you may think of Roy Moore, Jesus Christ he is not.

Alabama’s state auditor, another evangelical Christian, waded even deeper into the biblical weeds.  “Take the bible,” he said.  “Zachariah and Elizabeth, for instance.  Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth, and they became the parents of John the Baptist.  Also take Joseph and Mary.  Mary was a teenager, and Joseph was an adult carpenter.  They became parents of Jesus.  There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here.”

As the saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Even more ludicrous than the evangelical auditor’s words is the fact that he is too dumb even to get his bible right.  “Elizabeth” was long in the tooth when she gave birth to John the Baptist, and we have no idea how old Mary was when she married Joseph—if she ever did—because the New Testament simply doesn’t say.  We can only hope, for the sake of the people of Alabama, that their auditor has a better grasp of arithmetic than biblical writ when it comes time for him to balance the state’s books.

It is possible, of course, that Roy Moore is innocent of the accusations leveled against him.  But somehow I doubt it.  Not only are they detailed and concrete, they are part of a pattern.  Moore is merely the latest in a long series of holier-than-thou Republican politicians who have been caught, if you will pardon the expression, with their pants down.

Before Roy Moore, there was Alabama’s former governor, Robert Bentley, another vociferous “Christian,” who was caught on tape in the midst of a steamy and lewd tête-à-tête with a member of his staff, with whom he was having an adulterous affair.  Even earlier, there was Denny Hastert, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, a self-proclaimed “man of faith,” who is now serving time in prison for having sexually abused underage boys when he was a high school wrestling coach.  There was Tim Murphy, a staunchly “pro-life” Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, who committed adultery, got his lover pregnant, and promptly urged her to have an abortion.  There was Mark Foley, a “family values” Republican congressman from Florida, who was forced to resign, when it was revealed that he had been propositioning the young male “pages” who serve the House of Representatives.  Before that, there was the hypocrite par excellence, Newt Gingrich, who, having led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, was discovered to have been cheating on his wife all the while she was in a hospital bed, disabled by multiple sclerosis and dying.  And let us not forget Herman Cain, who made a brief run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.  Having presented himself as an icon of entrepreneurial success and personal rectitude, Cain was exposed for having had had multiple affairs and for sexually harassing many of his female employees.

This long, lamentable list of Republican sexual transgressions could be extended indefinitely.  Needless to say, such misconduct is not confined to Republicans.  It is entirely bipartisan and utterly deplorable, no matter who commits it.  Neither Bill Clinton nor Jack Kennedy were altar boys.

The difference between the bad behavior of Democrats and Republicans, however, is that the latter are so consistently sanctimonious, self-righteous, and hypocritical.  They pretend to virtues they do not possess, and even worse, they presume to lecture everyone else about the very evils that they themselves commit in secret.

The same can be said for the so-called “Christians” who support them.  More than 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump and cling to him still, despite indisputable evidence that he is an adulterer and a sexual predator. By what moral calculus can these people justify their behavior?  The answer is:  they can’t.  The oft-declared piety of these people is therefore no less phony than the sanctimonious proclamations of the Republicans they call their own.

Those whose faith is true and sincere do not lecture or hector others, they do not judge and condemn.  They strive to lead their own lives with quiet decency and to teach by example.  If they are Christians, they are content to abide by the words of Christ himself:  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.  By that standard, Roy Moore and countless other Republicans are moral and religious phonies.  Their piety is nothing less than a fraud—and a sinful one at that.

Like millions of Americans, I have been deeply depressed and more than a little angry for a year.  I simply could not wrap my head around the notion that anyone, no matter how much he or she may have reviled Hillary Clinton, could have been foolish and spiteful enough to vote for Donald Trump.  My gloom deepened as the months wore on and it became increasingly apparent that most Trump voters were standing by their man, even as evidence of his boundless ignorance, bottomless narcissism, total unfitness for office, and shameless personal corruption mounted. I began to feel that, if so many of my fellow Americans were so stubbornly gullible, there was little hope for the country ever to recover from the calamity of Trump’s election.  It seemed as if a new Dark Age had descended.

Adding to this cloud of despair was the apparent fecklessness of the Democratic Party.  Riven by ideological divisions, the various factions in the party seemed to be more interested in assigning blame for the results of the 2016 election than in getting their you-know-what together. For all the internal conflicts among Republicans, the fractures dividing Democrats seemed to be even worse.

Then, Tuesday happened.  In a series of important off-year elections, which are frequently thought to be harbingers of the mid-term elections that will take place next November, Democrats quite simply ran the table.  Not only did they win the big-ticket races, they won up and down the ballot, in state houses, counties, and city halls.  Not only did they win the races they were expected to win, they piled up victories where no one thought they had a chance.  And even where they were expected to win, the magnitude of their victories was breathtaking.

The Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor not only won, which he was expected to do, but won by double digits.  Indeed, the race was called within one minute of the polls closing.  Democrats now control all three branches of government in that state and by bigger margins than ever.

The outcome in Virginia was a bigger surprise.  The Democratic candidate for governor had an early lead in the polls, but that began to evaporate as his Republican opponent went full-court Trump, running an advertising blitz that was unsubtly racist.  As election day neared, the race became a toss-up, and the smart money was betting that the Republican would come out ahead.  Just 24 hours before the polls opened, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former “strategic adviser” was already taking credit for what he predicted would be a big win for “the Trump agenda”.

That didn’t happen.  On the contrary, the Democrat won by an historic margin, and Democrats swept every statewide office.  Even more surprising (though “stunning” might be the better word), Democrats completely erased a 30-seat Republican majority in Virginia’s House of Delegates, despite gerrymandering that made such an outcome seem all but impossible.  Recounts are underway in four Virginia districts where the final margins were razor-thin.  If even two of those go against Republicans, Democrats will have a majority for the first time in a generation.

The Democratic wave didn’t just roll over New Jersey and Virginia.  In the affluent exurban counties that ring Philadelphia, which have been solidly Republican for more than a century, Democrats swept into office everywhere.  In two affluent counties bordering New York City, incumbent Republicans with huge war chests and considered by all the pundits to be shoe-ins, were trounced by their Democratic challengers.  In more than two dozen mayor’s races across the country, established and well-funded Republicans were washed away by the Democratic wave.  Even in red-as-blood Georgia, two special elections for the state’s general assembly went to Democrats.

Many of these outcomes will have long-term effects no less important than the electoral results themselves.  In Virginia, for example, a federal court recently overturned the gerrymandering imposed on the state’s congressional districts by its Republican House of Delegates, which it found to be blatantly racist.  With a Democrat in the governor’s mansion, and without a decisive majority in the House of Delegates, Virginia’s Republicans have no chance of opposing the court’s ruling.  What’s more, the newly elected Democratic governor will still be in charge when the 2020 census is conducted and the boundaries of districts are reset.  There are 11 congressional districts in Virginia today, seven of which are held by Republicans, despite the fact that Democrats comprise a majority of the state’s voters.  That imbalance is about to flip, and there is absolutely nothing Republicans can do about it.

The loss of two Republican seats in Georgia’s general assembly may seem like a small thing, but it is anything but.  It has denied to Republicans the super-majority they needed to alter the state’s constitution, which they were hell-bent on doing to suppress voting rights, discriminate against the lesbian and gay community, and impose an evangelical Christian agenda on the state.  Republicans still have a majority in Georgia, but they no longer have the ability to do their worst.

Perhaps more significant than the election itself are the Democratic candidates who won that election.  To begin with, there were many more of them.  In Virginia, for example, Democrats contested fewer than half the seats in the House of Delegates four years ago.  This year, however, they contested nearly all of them.   As Woody Allen once quipped, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.”  It seems that, when Democrats show up,  they win.

Many of these candidates, not only in Virginia but throughout the country, were brand new to politics, never having considered running for office before. Most are ordinary people, from all walks of life, who decided that they had had enough, that they had to stand up and do something.  An extraordinary number of them are women, persons of color, immigrants, and members of the LGBT and transgender communities.

That these candidates were embraced by so many voters across the land is a sign, not of deliverance, but of hope.  It is as if Americans chose to rise up and affirm with a single voice that this is who we are, this is what America truly is.  Whatever else this election may signify, it a rebuke by a large part of the electorate to Donald Trump, a repudiation of the politics of bigotry, hate and division, and a warning to those Republicans who continue to support or enable Trump and his vile agenda.

It is far too soon to cheer.  Too many of our fellow citizens cling to their prejudices and to the lies of those who stoke them.  But it is not too late to hope.   Thanks to the election of November 7, 2017, we now know that millions of Americans are determined to reject the worst impulses in our political life and embrace the best.

In 1960, a Bulgarian-born writer named Elias Canetti published a strange and provocative book, entitled, in the original German, Masse und Macht.  Two years later, it was translated into English and published under the title, Crowds and Power.  It was difficult then to shoehorn Canetti’s work into any sort of conventional category, and it still is.  Crowds and Power is a work that defies tidy classifications. It commingles mythology and anthropology, sociology and psychology, history and philosophy, all the while combining scrupulous analysis with sometimes fantastical interpretation.

When Crowds and Power was first published, there were some who hailed it as a tour de force, as one of the most original and insightful works of the 20th century.  There were others who dismissed it as pretentious hocus-pocus.  The verdict is still out and will probably never be settled.  I will say this, however:  reading Crowds and Power today, more than 50 years after it first appeared, is nothing less than frightening—because so much of what Canetti had to say seems so eerily familiar.

To appreciate this book and its relevance to our present circumstances, it may be helpful to say something about the man who wrote it.  Elias Canetti’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews, who fled Spain to escape persecution under the Inquisition, eventually making their way to the city of Adrianople, which was situated at the intersection of Europe and Asia and part of the Ottoman Empire.  Canetti himself was born in 1905, in the Bulgarian city of Ruse on the southern bank of the Danube, also ruled by the Ottomans.  As the Ottoman Empire began to unravel, the Canetti’s emigrated yet again—to England.  There it was that Elias began his long and astonishing intellectual journey.

He had grown up speaking Bulgarian and Ladino (sometimes called “Judaeo-Spanish,” though it is a mixture of many languages); he became fluent in English, wrote in German, and was conversant in French.  After studying in Frankfurt and Vienna, he became a British subject, but spent the last 20 years of his life in Zurich.  Along the way, he picked up a Nobel Prize for literature.  Elias Canetti was an old-world cosmopolitan to his fingertips, at home in a dozen different cultures, with a range of interests and a depth of knowledge that is almost impossible to imagine in the cramped and crass age we now inhabit.  It is this that accounts for the fascinating complexity of his book.

When I say “complexity,” I don’t mean “obscurity”.  On the contrary, Canetti’s language is clear as day, and his premise is simple.  It is that much of human behavior can be traced back to primitive origins, to a time when human beings huddled together in close-knit groups for warmth, sustenance, and safety.  There were no “individuals” then; there was only the pack, the tribe, and ultimately the crowd.  It is Canetti’s claim that the crowd behavior we learned over the course of several hundred thousands of years is with us still.  Canetti identifies the different kinds of crowds according to the emotions that move them—anger, joy, fear, jealousy—and he shows how the impulses motivating crowd behavior cast their spell over politics, religion, and war.

Underlying the various kinds of crowd behavior Canetti describes, there is a single psychological narrative.  When a crowd begins to gather, tension sets in, as individuals struggle to decide whether to surrender themselves to the crowd or to stand apart.  This tension builds, until it can be contained no longer, leading to a moment of “discharge”—a cathartic release that can be ecstatic, inspiring, or violent.  The moment of “discharge” is what makes a crowd.  Only then do individuals sublimate their differences and surrender to the group.   In Canetti’s words:  “It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.”  The moment of discharge can be harmless and benign, but it always contains the potential for something more sinister.

The “discharge” Canetti describes is not an abstraction.  A “discharge” occurs, for example, when the pent-up crowd at a football game leaps to its feet and frantically cheers a touchdown or boos a fumble.  It occurs when a congregation of evangelicals rise from their pews, shut their eyes, begin to sway, and intone “amen” and “hallelujah”.  A “discharge” occurred during the French Revolution, when the Parisian mob jammed into the Place de la Bastille and roared its collective approval, as the severed heads of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI dropped onto the sawdust below the guillotine.  It occurred when throngs of glassy-eyed Germans, once the most cultured people in Europe, goose-stepped into the stadium at Nuremberg, thrust up their arms in salute, and shouted, in a single demonic voice, Sieg Heil! 

Among the many crowds Canetti describes, perhaps the most terrifying is what he calls  a ”Baiting Crowd:”

This crowd is out for killing and it knows whom it wants to kill.  It heads for this goal with unique determination and cannot be cheated of it.  The proclaiming of the goal, and the spreading about of who it is that is to perish, is enough to make the crowd form.  This concentration on killing is of a special kind and of an unsurpassed intensity.  Everyone wants to participate; everyone wants to strike a blow and, in order to do this, pushes as near as he can to the victim…One important reason for the rapid growth of the baiting crowd is that there is no risk.  There is no risk because the crowd have immense superiority on their side.  The victim can do nothing to them…A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the great majority of men.

It is impossible to read these words without thinking of Donald Trump and the feral crowds that swarmed, and still swarm, to his rallies, pummeling protestors, intimidating journalists, and chanting “Lock her up!”  This behavior surely fits Canetti’s definition of a “Baiting Crowd” that is “out for killing” and knows “whom it wants to kill”.

If Crowds and Power has anything to say to us today, it is this:  the veneer of civilization and culture, of laws and norms, that stands between human decency and human depravity is as thin as a sheet of glass and just as fragile.  A mere chip can suddenly spread to become a sprawling crack—one that may shatter civilization itself.  Thanks to Donald Trump, there is already a chip in that glass; we cannot in good conscience sit by and wait for it to spread.

In the waning hours of Friday evening, we learned that the office of special council Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government to sway the outcome of the 2016 election, would soon be issuing its first indictments.  Despite much speculation, we did not actually know who the targets of those indictments were going to be or precisely when they would be issued.

Early Monday morning, we found out.  Events have been unfolding rapidly ever since.

In the event, three persons were indicted:  Trump’s former campaign manager and long-time Washington lobbyist, Paul Manafort; his protégé and business partner, Rick Gates; and an obscure quasi-academic named George Papadopoulos, who rather mysteriously came out of nowhere to become one of Trump’s first “foreign policy advisers”.  Manafort and Gates pled “not guilty” to the charges leveled against them and are now under house arrest.  Papadopoulos, on the other hand, pled “guilty,” after agreeing to cooperate with the investigation.

Although I am neither a lawyer nor a legal scholar, I have read a number of indictments in my time, and I can tell you that the indictment Mueller filed against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates is a hum-dinger.

Thirty-one pages long, it contains 12 separate counts or charges, each a federal felony punishable by a prison sentence.  The charges range from conspiracy to defraud the United States, to money-laundering, tax evasion, violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and lying to various tax and law enforcement entities.

What’s more, the indictment lays out evidence substantiating these charges in what can only be described as extraordinary detail.  It enumerates 13 overseas shell companies set up by the defendants.  It itemizes dozens of transactions, by which money from unreported foreign bank accounts was funneled through those companies to pay for luxury cars, art, and real estate.  It even includes the text of email exchanges with their accountants, in which they blatantly lied, stating that they owned no foreign bank accounts or assets.  The shameless chutzpah of this behavior is staggering.

Reading this indictment, it is difficult to imagine how either defendant, and Paul Manafort in particular, can hope to escape conviction.   The final paragraphs are particularly intimidating.  They declare the government’s intention to seek the forfeiture of any and all personal assets that were in the slightest degree associated with the crimes alleged.  Which means that Paul Manafort, who is now 68 years old, may go to prison for a couple of dozen years and emerge, at the age of 90, penniless and bankrupt.

The other indictment we learned about yesterday, against George Papadopoulos, is starkly different.  It stipulates that Papadopoulos, by pleading “guilty” to the charge of lying to  the FBI, has agreed to cooperate with the investigation; accordingly, Mueller’s office will recommend leniency, with no prison time to speak of and a modest fine.

This indictment poses a more direct threat to the Trump campaign and the White House, because Papadopoulos affirms that he was contacted by the Russians, and contacted them in return, to obtain hacked emails that might damage Hillary Clinton.  He also confesses to discussing all this with several figures higher up in the campaign.  Those figures are identified in the indictment by their titles, not their names, but it is certain that Mueller already knows who they are.

The problem in all this for Trump and his entourage is two-fold:

First, Papadopoulos’ confession puts paid to any pretense that there was no collusion between Trump and the Russians.  Whether that collusion amounts to a criminal conspiracy is another matter, yet to be determined.

Second, and more importantly, we now know that the Trump campaign was informed that the Russians had hacked Democratic emails (a crime) and chose not to report it to law enforcement (another crime).  Whether or not Robert Mueller eventually indicts anyone for “conspiracy,” it is all but certain that he will indict one or more people in the Trump orbit for these crimes.

A number of legal experts have suggested that the simultaneous release of these two very different indictments is part of a deliberate strategy on Mueller’s part to send a warning to future targets of the investigation.  To wit:  if you cooperate, you will pay a negligible price; if you fail to cooperate, you will face the prospect of total ruin.  I have no idea whether what we learned yesterday is part of some grand strategy or the accidental result of  evidentiary chips falling where they may.

I do know this, however:  none of this is good for Donald Trump, and no amount of obfuscation can any longer alter that fact.

In the days to come, we should expect more denunciations and distractions from Trump and his minions, more calls for investigating Hillary Clinton for ancient transgressions that never occurred, more protestations that there was “no collusion” between Trump and the Russians, despite all evidence to the contrary.

By now, such transparently self-interested and obfuscatory tactics are par for the course. They will undoubtedly provide savory chum for the bottom-feeders that populate the Trump “base,” for the delusional audience that watches Fox News Channel, and for spineless Republicans who refuse to acknowledge the Trump presidency for what it actually is:  an ethical, legal, and Constitutional catastrophe.  None of that will do anything to alter the fact that criminal indictments are underway.

How all this will ultimately end is anyone’s guess.  We can be certain, however, that it will not end well.  To anyone who isn’t completely blinded by parti pris, it has been obvious for months that a criminal now occupies the White House.  One by one, those around him, those who conspired to elect him, those who have enabled his corruption, self-dealing and wrongdoing, will come tumbling down.  Whether the criminal-in-chief comes tumbling after them remains to be seen.

But the first shoe has dropped.  Many more are yet to come.

When, in the space of a single week, a former Republican President, George W. Bush, and three distinguished Republican Senators, John McCain, Bob Corker, and Jeff Flake, all suggested or, in the cases of Corker and Flake, stated flat out that Donald Trump is unfit to be president and a danger to the nation, the media proclaimed that a “civil war” had erupted within the Republican Party.  We were told that Bush, McCain, Corker, and Flake were merely stating for public consumption what countless other Republicans were thinking or saying behind Trump’s back.  It was also suggested that a metaphorical dam had broken; that it was only a matter of time before other Republicans would join the chorus of rebuke and repudiation.

Don’t hold your breath.

Few of the so-called establishment Republicans who purportedly deplore Trump in private have thus far uttered a peep in public.  Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the rest of what passes for Republican “leadership” these days have chosen either to stand mute or to stand by their man.

Two reasons are generally invoked to explain or excuse this cowardice and complicity.

The first is that Republican legislators fear Trump’s wrath on Twitter or the rage of his rabid and feral “base,” almost all of whom say to pollsters that they blame Republicans in Congress, not the ranting orangutan in the White House, for the woes of the nation.

The second is that Republicans have decided to hold their noses, and wait out the Twitter storms and infantile tantrums, in order to turn their beloved “conservative principles” into actual legislation, the generous implication being that Republicans have chosen to tolerate a transitory evil for the sake of a greater and more lasting good.

The truth behind the Republican Party’s bargain with the devil is less creditable and more terrible than any of that.  Far from merely tolerating the evil of Trump for the sake of achieving a greater good, Republicans have embraced him to accomplish an even greater evil.  Republicans in Congress know full well that their so-called “agenda” is anathema to an overwhelming majority of Americans, and they also know that this has been the case for decades.  They simply don’t care.  They are nothing less than a hostile minority determined to impose their ideology on the rest of us, whatever the cost to the nation as a whole.

Because they are a minority, they also know that, without systematic gerrymandering and voter suppression, without constant cultural fear-mongering, and without a vulgar but charismatic demagogue at the helm of their party, they wouldn’t have a sinner’s chance in hell of enacting their cynical agenda, let alone achieving or retaining control of government at the state and federal level.

Americans don’t believe the country should be beggared to fund a tax cut for the richest one percent of the population, nor do they swallow the ludicrous proposition that lowering corporate taxes will somehow translate into higher wages; yet these notions are at the very heart of the Republican “agenda”.

Americans don’t want Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid to be gutted, all the while we squander ever greater sums on military spending and undeclared wars; yet that is what the Republican “agenda” calls for.

Americans don’t think that environmental and consumer protections should be stripped away, that public education should be privatized, or that public lands should be turned over to oil and mining companies; yet that is what the Republican “agenda” aims to do and is doing.

Americans don’t believe that we should return to the dark days of back-alley abortions, when women were denied any chance, let alone the right, to make their own reproductive choices; yet that is what the Republican “agenda” demands.

Americans don’t accept the proposition that gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens should be discriminated against because of the so-called “religious scruples” of their employers or business owners; yet that is central to the Republican “agenda”.

Americans don’t believe in a “whites only” country that slams the door on immigrants and turns its back on hapless refugees; yet that is where the Republican “agenda” is taking us.

The so-called “conservative principles” of the Republican Party have never aligned with or reflected the feelings of most Americans, because the ideology behind those “principles” is blind to the lessons of history, impervious to the reality of daily life, and fundamentally indecent.

For Republicans to peddle this blinkered ideology has always required the political equivalent of a street hustler’s shell game.  Look here, look there, just don’t look too closely at what lies under the shells.  Tax cuts for the wealthy are always sold as “job creation”.  Basic health and safety regulations are always smeared as a “burden” on small business.   Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid are always slammed as out-of-control “entitlements” that will someday bankrupt the nation instead of being what they actually are—the least the richest nation in the world should be willing to provide for its neediest citizens.

The Republican Party’s compact with Donald Trump is merely the latest iteration of this never-ending con.  In Trump, who is the ultimate flimflam man, Republicans have found their perfect president.  That is why the Republican Party isn’t tolerating Trump to accomplish a noble purpose; it is embracing him.  That he is a bigoted and anti-democratic autocrat doesn’t deter them in the least—because without such an autocrat in charge, they know that they have no chance of imposing their own bigoted and anti-democratic agenda on an unwilling nation.

And that is why they will never turn their back on the national embarrassment that is Donald Trump.  If Trump’s ship begins to sink, don’t expect Republicans in Congress to jump overboard.  They will go down with the ship, singing Yankee Doodle all the way, until they eventually hit bottom, and their lungs fill with saltwater and explode.  Down deep, Republicans know that, without Donald Trump, they and their so-called “principles” would already be sleeping with the fishes.

Little more than a month ago, Congressman Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois criticized Donald Trump’s chief of staff, former Marine Corps general John Kelly, for refusing to lift a finger to stop the deportation of nearly a million undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children.  In a moment of disappointed anguish, Gutiérrez remarked that Kelly was “a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear”.  An avalanche of outrage and repudiation immediately came crashing down around the congressman’s head from those on both right and left, many proclaiming Kelly to be a “hero,” whose behavior should and could not responsibly be questioned.

Now, however, it appears that Congressman Gutiérrez was right after all.

Two days ago, John Kelly strode to the podium in the briefing room of the White House to defend Donald Trump’s phone call to the family of a soldier killed two weeks ago in the African nation of Niger.  That call was made, after much delay and public pressure, all the while the soldier’s wife and parents were on the way to take possession of his remains.  In the car was their congresswoman, a Florida Democrat named Frederica Wilson, who heard the conversation while it was conducted by speakerphone.  Appalled by what she heard, she later described the president’s remarks to the family as sarcastic and callous.  It scarcely needs saying that Trump immediately accused her of lying, and did so both in person and on Twitter.  Nevertheless, the congresswoman refused to back down, and just hours after Trump’s denials, her version of events was confirmed by the family.

When John Kelly addressed the White House press corps, he did not even try to deny that Trump had said what he said.  Instead, he tried to explain it away.  He began by recounting gratuitous and grizzly details of how the bodies of dead soldiers are packed in ice and brought home and then went on to describe how he learned of his own son’s death in Iraq.  Many have praised this part of Kelly’s comments as being deeply heartfelt.  This is a misreading of what he was really up to.  John Kelly was trying to distract us from the facts, using the oldest rhetorical trick in the world—the substitution of an emotional argument for a rational one.

The cynicism behind his sanctimony became instantly apparent when he took an oblique swipe at Barack Obama for writing, rather than calling, to console him for the loss of his son.  Even worse, he insinuated that the “gold star” Khan family had violated something “sacred” by appearing at the Democratic convention to assail Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants.  This led him to muse nostalgically for the loss of other things that were “sacred” when he was growing up, including “the dignity of life,” the “honor of women,” and “religion”.  In this walk down memory lane, Kelly revealed himself to be as retrograde and backward looking as the man he serves.

The worst part of Kelly’s performance came at the end, when he attacked Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, all the while refusing to mention her name:  “It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation.  Absolutely stuns me.”  He then called Wilson an “empty barrel” in a “long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise”.

Never for a moment did John Kelly pause to ask himself why Congresswoman Wilson was in the car in the first place or why the family might have wanted her to hear the call.  She was there, not as an “empty barrel,” but as a friend, who had known the fallen soldier since the time he was a child.  Nor did Kelly ever consider the possibility that it is up to the grieving family, to the wife and parents who suffered the loss, to decide whether such a conversation is “sacred”.  It is not John Kelly’s business to make such a determination, and it certainly isn’t Donald Trump’s.

It got even worse.  Kelly told a derogatory tale about Frederica Wilson’s appearance at the dedication of an FBI building in Miami, the impropriety of which he also judged to be “stunning”.  Unfortunately for Kelly, his story of what actually occurred at that dedication turned out to be completely false.

More troubling still is that Kelly’s assault on Frederica Wilson is part of a pattern.  When he was criticized by Luis Gutiérrez a month ago, he said:  “As far as the congressman and other irresponsible members of Congress are concerned, they have the luxury of saying what they want, as they do nothing and have almost no responsibility.”  Put aside the fact that Gutiérrez, far from “doing nothing,” is one of the most stalwart and effective defenders of minority rights in the country.  It would seem that, to John Kelly, members of Congress, particularly when they are women or people of color, deserve nothing but contempt.

Nor does his contempt end there.  When he finished his attack  on Frederica Wilson, Kelly refused to take questions from any member of the press who did not personally know a “gold star” family.  Thus, Kelly placed himself on a pedestal of moral superiority, immune to questions or criticism.  This stance was reinforced the next day, when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared that it would be “highly inappropriate” for the press to challenge a four-star Marine Corps general.

We have been told for months that John Kelly is one of the “adults in the room,” whose presence in the Trump administration may save us from the president’s worst and most impetuous impulses.  We have also been told that he is a man of uncommon honor and decency, who has decided to grit his teeth and serve this president to protect the country.  This narrative was never entirely plausible.  Its plausibility is now entirely gone.

We can, and should, respect John Kelly for his military service.  We can, and should, honor and lament the loss of his son.  But that does not give John Kelly a lifetime pass; it does not immunize him against honest questions and fair criticism.

John Kelly did not have to go before the cameras to defend Donald Trump.  There is nothing in his job description that required it.  Either he was ordered to do so and acquiesced, or he made the choice willingly.  Either he is not the man of courageous principle that he is so often made out to be, or he is as unprincipled as the man he serves.

It has frequently been observed that those who enter Donald Trump’s orbit are eventually dragged down to his level, only to find their reputations in tatters.  It now appears that John Kelly may have been there from the start.   This week, we learned that Luis Gutiérrez was right.  John Kelly’s decision to serve Donald Trump is “a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear”.