gracchusdixit

In the wake of the latest and most terrible mass shooting in our history, we are once again witnessing a shadow play that we have seen many times before.  Those, who are justifiably outraged by the slaughter in Las Vegas, are crying out for “common sense gun control”.  Those, who stubbornly believe that even the slightest attempt to control guns is blasphemy, retort that “now is not the time to politicize a tragedy”.  Both send their perfunctory “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families, as if thoughts and prayers could somehow bring back the dead and erase all memory of the tragedy itself.

We all know how this sadly predictable shadow play is going to end.  The motives of the killer will be psychoanalyzed in excruciating detail.  The excuse will be made that he was in no way typical of “law abiding” gun owners.  We will be told for the thousandth time that “guns don’t kill; people do”.  Meaningful action will be deferred until the public’s fury eventually subsides.  Republicans and a few timid Democrats from gun-friendly states will then avow their unflinching fidelity to the Second Amendment.  And, in the end, the NRA will get its way.  It always does.

I do not propose to add another word to the thousands that have already been written  about this deplorable farce.  I have something else to say.

It is that “common sense gun control” is a contradiction in terms and a complete waste of time—because there is nothing even remotely sensible about owning guns in the first place.

Anyone who claims that he needs a gun to protect himself against burglars or break-ins is living in a fantasy world conjured up by the gun lobby.  Crimes against property are lower than they’ve been in decades.  The odds of the average American suffering a “home invasion” are close to zero.

Anyone who asserts that he needs a gun to protect himself against “bad guys with guns” has watched too many Bruce Willis movies.  More than half the gun-related deaths in this country are suicides; a majority of the rest occur within families—all too often, perpetrated by violent husbands who turn their weapons against their own spouses or children.

Any gun-owner who claims to be a “sportsman” should ask himself what “sport” there  is in slaughtering animals that have not the slightest chance of escape or survival when they face tormentors larded up with the technology of modern warfare.  Guns aren’t the equivalent of baseball bats, tennis racquets, or hockey sticks.  They are instruments of death, and their only purpose is to draw blood.  Where is the “sport” in that?

It is time to recognize that our nation’s love affair with guns is beyond being senseless—it is a sickness, with deep roots in our past and our psyche.  If this sickness were limited to our private behavior within our own borders, it would be bad enough.  But it extends to our behavior on the world stage.

On a planet with a population of nearly eight billion, there are roughy 875 million privately owned firearms.  Americans add up to merely five percent of that population, but they own 40 percent of the weapons.  Exactly the same ratio applies to our share of global military spending.  This may be coincidental, of course.  But if it is, the coincidence is chilling.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have used our military power—our weapons—to wage dozens of undeclared wars on almost every continent of the globe.  We have instigated dozens of illegal coups d’état to topple democratically elected governments that refused to kowtow to our interests.  Far from decrying such crimes, our public culture worships those who commit them.  Any man, woman, or donkey who dons a uniform and picks up a weapon is automatically declared a “hero”.

In truth, many of the most revered “heroes” in our national mythology were little more than violent, gun-toting thugs.  Andrew Jackson, the “hero” of the Battle of New Orleans, was a killer and a racist.  Teddy Roosevelt, the “hero” of the Battle of San Juan Hill, was an unapologetic imperialist, who loved nothing better than staring down the barrel of a gun and killing every hapless creature in sight.  The “heroes” who died at the Alamo did not fight to free themselves from Mexican tyranny; they fought to prevent their slaves being freed by a Mexican government that outlawed slavery three decades before the Emancipation Proclamation.  If these so-called “heroes” were alive today, they would undoubtedly be card-carrying members of the NRA.  The line from “Old Hickory” to Donald Trump runs dead straight.

Americans are constantly told that ours is a morally “exceptional” nation, an example for the rest of the world to admire and emulate.  This is a fairy tale.  If we are exceptional, it is because we have an exceptionally aggressive and violent history.

Our country was created by conquest, exploitation, extermination, and theft—all carried out at gunpoint.  The labor of millions of black Africans, dragged to these shores in chains, was extracted by white Americans carrying guns.  The lands and lives of millions of Native Americans were stolen by white Americans carrying guns. The freedoms of countless Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos were crushed by white Americans carrying guns.

All the hifalutin talk about Second Amendment freedom and self-defense, all the fear-mongering about crime and “bad guys,” all the conspiracy theories about the federal government “coming for our guns” is designed to paper over what amounts to a pathological obsession.  Americans idolize their guns, because guns make them feel powerful.  Many cling to their guns, because they are pathetically insecure about their manhood or their place in the world.   Some are addicted to their guns, because they are violent and unstable bullies, who shouldn’t be allowed to get behind the wheel of a car, let alone own a firearm.

No “common sense” measures will ever rid the country of this sickness.  The only cure is to shed our illusions, see the sickness for what it actually is, and rip it out.  Until that day comes, the next Las Vegas is just around the corner.

On the evening of April 7, 1775, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who gave us the first definitive dictionary of the English language, remarked to his friend and biographer, James Boswell: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”  We do not know what sparked this now famous aperçu or exactly which scoundrel the redoubtable doctor had in mind—because Boswell didn’t say.

We can be reasonably certain, however, that if Dr. Johnson were still with us, he would be surprised not in the least by the latest shenanigans of the scoundrel who now occupies the White House.

During a recent rally in the state of Alabama, the purported purpose of which was to support one of the two Republican candidates aiming to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate, Donald Trump veered off script and improvised, as he so often does.  After a tiresome and familiar litany of attacks against “Crooked Hillary” and Senator John McCain for refusing to support the GOP’s latest craven attempt to deny healthcare to 30 million Americans, Trump, out of the blue, turned in a different direction, no doubt sensing, like a Catskills comic, that his stale material wasn’t working as it once did.  In search of a new applause line, Trump directed his ire at the National Football League and those of its players who have chosen to kneel during pre-game recantations of the national anthem to protest the endless murder of African Americans by racist local police officers across the land:

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He is fired. He’s fired!’

Since Trump is a racist himself, it is no surprise that he chose to make black athletes the object of his ire, just as it was no surprise that he chose to defend the Neo-Nazi’s and KKK members who descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, several weeks ago.

Over the weekend following this attack, during which Trump “doubled down” via Twitter, his surrogates and cabinet members slavishly tried to defend his vicious rhetoric.  The most craven, and least convincing, of these defenders was Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin.  Mnuchin is a former Goldman-Sachs banker and predatory mortgage investor, who was recently caught red-handed trying to wangle a government jet to transport himself and his bride, at the taxpayer’s expense, on their honeymoon.   This is the man who proclaimed:

This isn’t about Democrats, it’s not about Republicans, it’s not about race, it’s not about free speech.  They can do free speech on their own time.  This is about respect for the military and first responders in the country.

For Mnuchin to say, “This is about respect for the military, ” is richly ironic, coming as it does from a man who has never served a day in the military and who now works for a president who evaded the draft five times.

Even more ironic is the claim that Trump’s rhetoric has nothing to do with race or free speech, when he indulges in blatant race-bating, with the obvious purpose of chilling free speech and the right to protest.  If it had been white athletes kneeling during the national anthem, there is no doubt whatsoever that Trump would have been as quiet as the proverbial mouse.

In the end, all of this is a cynical attempt to distract public attention from the ongoing failures and scandals of the Trump presidency:  the relentless pace of the investigation into Russia’s effort to rig the 2016 election; the collapse of GOP attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act; the revelation that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law used private email accounts and servers to conduct public business, just like “Crooked Hillary;” the self-dealing, financial conflicts of interest, and corruption of highly placed administration officials.

As dreadful as this campaign of distraction undoubtedly is, it runs the risk of distracting our attention from the more fundamental issue of patriotism itself.

The flag, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance are merely symbols; they are not the nation, nor are they intrinsic to our governing ideals and institutions.  You won’t find a word in the Constitution about the flag, let alone the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance, both of which were fabricated long after our republic was founded.  What you will find in the Constitution are hard and fast protections of free speech and the right to protest.  The Founding Fathers were not concerned about the symbols of patriotic feeling; they were concerned about the substantive issue of personal freedom.  Trump is trying to conflate the two; indeed, he is using the one to undermine the other.

Public displays of reverence for symbols like the flag or the national anthem neither signify nor constitute what it means to be patriotic.  The decision to stand with hand laid over heart before the beginning of an NFL game does not qualify as patriotism, and Trump’s claim that it does must be rejected for the sham that it is.  On the contrary, such gestures are all too often cheap, painless, and in some cases cowardly substitutes for the real thing.  In the case of Donald Trump, the cowardice is appallingly apparent.

Finally and most importantly, Trump would like us to believe that patriotism is a one-way street, and that he, as president, has the right to demand reverence for the nation and its symbols, while we, as citizens, must comply without question or demur.  That is a travesty and a perversion.

In effect, Trump is demanding that we bow to the old saying, “My country, right or wrong”.  Those words are the very definition of what it means to be unpatriotic—because the relationship between a nation and its citizens is reciprocal.  For a nation to be worthy of patriotic feeling, for its symbols to be worthy of respect, for its leaders to have any purchase on the loyalty or patriotism of its citizens, all citizens must be treated with the fairness, justice, and respect they deserve as human beings.  Until our nation honors and upholds its side of that civic bargain, phony displays of patriotism will continue to be the last refuge of scoundrels like Donald Trump.

Confronting the cumulative calamities of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and now Hurricane Maria, many journalists and even many climate scientists have struck a conspicuously cautious note in discussing the connection between these catastrophes and climate change.  Again and again, they have drawn a fine and tortured distinction between the intensity of these events and their frequency, asserting that global warming may affect the one but not cause the other.  We can be reasonably certain, they insist, that climate change made these storms worse, but we cannot be absolutely certain that it caused them.  This, it has to be said, is a distinction without a difference.

This distinction is often accompanied by the observation that major tropical storms occurred before global warming and would continue to occur without it—an observation that is not only trite but utterly irrelevant.  What is more, and as a simple matter of fact, the dichotomy between the intensity and frequency is simply false.

We’ve been tallying the number and intensity of tropical storms for about 150 years, using a variety of metrics and measurement tools.  For much of that time, the average annual frequency of such storms remained more or less constant.  Some years were better or worse than others, but the long-term trend was essentially flat.  That began to change abruptly about 25 years ago, when the running average of major tropical storms and hurricanes started to climb dramatically—as it continues to do.  To imagine or suggest that this is a mere coincidence, having nothing to do with a commensurate rise in global temperatures, is naïve at best and delusional at worst.

It is also shoddy scientific reasoning.

Hurricanes are complex phenomena, which cannot usefully be parsed into classificatory categories like “frequency” and “intensity”.  Even if it were true that the frequency of these storms isn’t increasing, that would say little about cause and effect in any particular case.  Whether we are talking about one storm or a hundred, it is entirely possible that global warming not only magnifies the intensity of a given storm, by producing more moisture and energy, but causes it in the first place.

Do we know for a certainty that climate change is specifically responsible for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, or Maria, which even as I write is sweeping through the Caribbean like a runaway locomotive?  Of course not.  But that specific uncertainty proves exactly nothing.  To dismiss the possibility (in this case, the probability) of a cause-and-effect relationship is both ludicrous and wrong.

It is wrong, not only as a matter of science and logic, but also as a matter of morality.  By insisting on the unknowability of the relationship between a particular cause and a particular effect, unduly cautious pundits and experts cause confusion, sow doubt in the public mind, and undermine efforts to combat climate change precisely when those efforts are needed most.  It is already too late to reverse the consequences of global warming—storms like Harvey, Irma, and Maria are going to batter us again and again—but we still have a chance to mitigate, and defend ourselves against, consequences that are even worse.  This may be our last chance; this window of opportunity will not stay open for long.

Why, one must thereafter ask, have so many otherwise sensible voices been so hesitant to name the problem for what it is, so eager to separate frequency from intensity, so reluctant to identify cause and effect?  Why have they so consistently shied away from stating the obvious?

The answer lies in the legacy of more than 20 years of powerful, persistent, and well-funded climate change denial—by the fossil fuel industry, by its lobbyists, and by the politicians who do their bidding.  After Hurricane Harvey drowned Houston in what can only be described as a modern-day equivalent of a biblical flood, Scott Pruitt, the head of Donald Trump’s EPA, declared, with a straight face, that it would be “insensitive” to discuss climate change when we needed to focus on recovery and rescue.  To any sensible person, far from being insensitive, it would be insane not to discuss the cause of the disaster and its consequences.  Yet, in the end, Pruitt has largely got his way.

This sort of tactic is not new.  It is the sort of dodge that we’ve heard for decades from the National Rifle Association and its bought-and-paid-for members of Congress.  Whenever there is another in the endless string of abominable mass shootings that bedevil our country, we are told that “now is not the time to talk about gun control”.  Instead, we are called upon to send our “thoughts and prayers” to the grieving families of the victims, as if “thoughts and prayers” might somehow undo the crime or resurrect the dead.

When it comes to climate change, a similar drumbeat of distraction, obfuscation, and intimidation has come into play and has had its effect.  Although a large majority of Americans now understand that global warming is real and realize its perils, countless journalists and scientists have been cowed into euphemistic caution.  Rather than speaking the truth forthrightly, rather than calling a spade a spade, rather than saying that catastrophic storms are caused, not merely intensified, by climate change, they continue to parse their sentences and mince their words.

“Thoughts and prayers” are of no greater use to the millions who have lost their homes in these devastating storms than they are to the thousands who each and every year lose their loved ones to gun violence.   If we want to end the destruction, if we want to stop the violence, if we want to save the planet, it’s time to stop mincing words.  If the 300 million guns let loose in America don’t kill us, climate change surely will.

Since the largely unexpected—and to some, still shocking—outcome of the 2016 presidential election, many of the country’s leading liberal thinkers have been asking a question that is now emblazoned on the title page of Hillary Clinton’s new book:  What Happened?  Not content with trying to answer that question, liberals have gone on to flagellate themselves for failing to see it coming.

Leading the chorus of self-recrimination is Michael Moore, comedian, documentary film maker, and political activist.  It was Moore who (by his account at least) all but begged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to pay more attention to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, three formerly Democratic swing states that, by the thinnest of margins, tossed the electoral college to Trump.  Moore’s theory of the case—his answer to the question: what happened?—has largely been accepted by those who are now torturing themselves.

Moore’s theory of the case involves two claims:

The first is that voters in “the heartland,” feeling ignored or patronized by “coastal” political, financial, and media elites, turned to Trump as a voice and a champion, as a man who wasn’t afraid to speak their language and “tell it like it is,” who was willing to take on the establishment and “drain the swamp”.  In this account, the racism, misogyny, and economic selfishness of Trump voters played a minor role.  They felt neglected; therefore, we must take them at their word and accept that they truly were.

The second claim is that these voters, whatever may be said about their crude and sometimes vicious behavior at Trump rallies and their embrace of the even cruder and more vicious presidential candidate, were in some fundamental sense right, that those who dwell on the two coasts do live in a “bubble,” detached from the real Americans who populate “the heartland”.  These “bubble dwellers” are therefore called upon to empathize with, and to some extent excuse, those who dwell elsewhere.  By implication, they are also called upon to concede the proposition that Trump supporters are more authentically American than the rest of us.

This is the narrative that now dominates nearly every account of the 2016 election. Scarcely a day goes by that some version of this narrative doesn’t appear on television or in one or more of our leading newspapers or magazines.  It is a narrative that not only attempts to explain the outcome of the election but demands a confession of guilt and penitence from the “bubble dwellers” who failed to foresee it.   According to this narrative, it is they who must open their eyes to what’s going on in the “real America;” it is they who must change their thinking and expiate their sins.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this twisted thinking.  When something goes wrong in our public life, the first instinct of liberals is to blame themselves.  The first instinct of conservatives, on the other hand, is to blame their enemies.  While liberals are forever insecure about their own own motives, conservatives are forever certain that they, and they alone, are in the right—because a sense of righteous condemnation lies at the heart of conservative thought.  This divide between two opposing political temperaments has a long history, and it isn’t likely to dissipate any time soon.  To quote the Book of Common Prayer:  As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.

Or maybe not.

It’s time to put a stop to the nonsensical proposition that those who live in the so-called heartland have any claim to being uniquely and authentically American.  It is time to ignore their caterwauling about out-of-touch coastal elites.  It isn’t the coastal elites who inhabit a social, cultural, and economic bubble; it’s the idiots who voted for Donald Trump.  They are the ones who are out of touch with the real world.  They are the ones who prefer self-pity over self-knowledge.  They are the ones who demand that the rest of us “feel their pain” rather than facing up to the painful realities of the world as it actually is.  They are the minority of Americans who dwell in a bubble of ignorance.

The 20, largely coastal, states that voted for Hillary Clinton constitute a majority of the country’s population and are responsible for two-thirds of our GDP.  The number of college graduates in those states is 48 percent; in the states that voted for Trump, the number is 36 percent.  Massachusetts and Connecticut, two states that voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, have the highest SAT scores in the nation.  Alabama and West Virginia, two states that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, have the lowest.  This does not mean that Trump voters are unintelligent.  But it does mean that they are ignorant.  The correlation between education and knowledge is indisputable.  There is no escaping the reality that voters in Alabama and West Virginia simply know less, about nearly everything, than voters in Massachusetts and Connecticut.   It may be impolite to say so, but that doesn’t make it untrue.

There is, of course, a difference between accidental and willful ignorance.  It may be possible to excuse the ignorance of those who don’t know any better because they have never had an alternative.  It is not possible, however, to excuse those who embrace ignorance deliberately and with fervor, as if ignorance were itself a sign of virtue.

No group of willfully ignorant Americans has embraced Donald Trump with more fervor than White Evangelical Christians.  A majority of White Evangelicals deny evolution and climate change; many of them believe that the sun revolves around the earth, that astrology has a scientific basis, and that homosexuality causes hurricanes.  If such people had a scintilla of self-reflection, they could look up the facts and choose facts over fiction.  They have decided to choose otherwise.

These are the people who live in the real “bubble”— a bubble of delusion, medieval ignorance, and prejudice.  To feel sorry for them, to excuse their behavior, to pretend that they are more authentically American than the rest of us, is a travesty.

It’s time for liberals to stop blaming themselves for living in a bubble.  The real blame lies elsewhere—with the bubble-dwellers who voted for Donald Trump.

In deciding to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a.k.a. DACA, a policy introduced by President Barack Obama to protect the innocent children of illegal immigrants from deportation, Donald Trump had neither the courage nor the courtesy to announce the decision himself.  Instead, he handed this disreputable task to his all too eager Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

Speaking from a podium where he declined to take questions from the press, Sessions all but quivered with spiteful glee.  It was shockingly obvious that this decision was the fulfillment of his deepest heart’s desire.  In a syrupy southern drawl, he oozed self-satisfied moral outrage, justifying the decision with four specious claims:

(1) That DACA was an “unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch”.

(2) That it “contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences”.

(3)  That it has “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those jobs to go to illegal aliens”.

(4) That it “puts our nation at risk of crime, violence, and even terrorism”.

The first of these claims is, to say the very least, questionable.  More than 100 legal experts have publicly stated their judgement that it was well within Barack Obama’s constitutional powers to decide how immigration laws should be enforced.  In any event, it is up to the courts, not Jeff Sessions, to decide whether presidential actions are constitutional.

His other claims aren’t in the least questionable—they are utter rubbish.

The “surge” of unaccompanied minors he cited was caused, not by DACA, but by a wave of civil unrest and criminal violence in Central America. There is not a jot of evidence that DACA recipients have “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans,” or any Americans, for that matter.  And the insinuation that DACA recipients, or immigrants in general, “put our nation at risk” is absurd on its face.  No one can get DACA protection without passing criminal background checks, and immigrants in general are far less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.  For Jeff Sessions to pretend otherwise is duplicitous and deeply troubling, coming as it does from the chief law enforcement officer in the land.

Sessions would also like us to believe that, in rescinding DACA, he and Donald Trump are merely upholding the law:

To have a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest, we cannot admit everyone who would like to come here. That is an open border policy and the American people have rightly rejected it.

Therefore, the nation must set and enforce a limit on how many immigrants we admit each year and that means all cannot be accepted. 

This does not mean they are bad people or that our nation disrespects or demeans them in any way. It means we are properly enforcing our laws as Congress has passed them.

What Sessions does not say is that our immigration laws have always been, and still are, instruments of racist exclusion, coercion, and control.

Until 1882, the United States of America did, in fact, “admit everyone”.  Indeed, there were no national immigration laws, let alone passports or visas.  Immigrants merely showed up on the docks of New York or New Orleans, Philadelphia or San Francisco, and if they weren’t afflicted with a communicable disease, were rubber-stamped and sent on their way, left to fend for themselves.

That is how millions of German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, Chinese and Japanese immigrants came to these shores. They went to work on the railroads, in the mines and the fields, in the factories and the slaughterhouses.  Their toil and sweat built this country, and in the process, the lucky ones were able to build new lives for themselves and their families.  If our current immigration laws had been in place back then, those millions would have been rebuffed, and their descendants, myself among them, would never have had the chance to become Americans in the first place.

Our first national immigration law was passed in 1882, after a couple of decades in which thousands of cheap Chinese laborers had poured into the country to build the Union Pacific railroad.  The white Americans who got here earlier were bombarded by the popular press and complicit political demagogues with threats of a “Yellow Peril”.  The legislation that resulted from this racist fear-mongering was called—without an iota of politically correct irony or shame—the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The next wave of immigration laws came on the eve of the First World War, and for similar reasons.  The excuse was that the nation needed to be protected from “foreign influence” in a time of crisis.  The real reason, however, was that 15 million immigrants had poured in during the preceding 15 years.  Many of these were Catholics, whose swelling numbers threatened the privileges, prerogatives, and power of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants who then ran the country.  Like Jeff Sessions today, the proponents of these draconian immigration laws invoked the risk of “crime and violence” to bolster their case.  The Germans, they claimed, were violent, beer-besotted drunkards.  The Irish were not only drunkards, but Papists and terrorists.  The Italians were not only drunkards and Papists, but disease-carrying, swarthy criminals.   To stem this corrosive tide, to save the nation, to preserve its culture and traditions, the anti-immigration voices demanded that it was time to clamp down.

Immigration laws have never been the only instruments of racial and ethnic suppression in our history—eugenics, sterilization, even the 18th Amendment’s prohibition of alcohol all served the same purpose—but immigration laws have been the most enduring.  They endure to this day.

Jeff Sessions would like us to forget this racist history, because he is a racist himself, a man who would like nothing better than to purge the country of those he deems to be ethnically undesirable.  Bigots like Sessions always invoke the “rule of law,” as if that were somehow sacrosanct.  It is not.  The law is a set of the rules by which we agree to conduct our public and private affairs, and we may agree that living by such a set of rules is better than living by no rules at all.  However, the validity of any particular law, its claim on our obedience, and its authority to compel or punish our actions depend entirely upon its moral content.

It was Saint Augustine, perhaps the greatest of the Early Fathers of the Catholic Church, who said:  Lex iniusta non est lex…“An unjust law is no law at all.”  There is nothing just, and nothing even remotely lawful, in the racist prejudices of men like Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump.

What has happened, and is still happening, to the people of the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana is heartbreaking.  Thousands have lost their homes.  Thousands more have been displaced.  For hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, it will be many months, even years, before their lives can be pieced back together.  A large swath of Houston, our nation’s fourth largest city, is underwater.  Much of its infrastructure has been washed away.  Many of its streets and schools, bayous and bridges, parks and public places are all but gone.  The mere thought of how all this damage is to be repaired boggles the mind.

Hurricane Harvey, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has dubbed a storm of “epic” proportions, will eventually cost our nation billions of dollars.  Exactly how many billions, we do not yet know.  It is all but certain, however, that the final figure will far surpass the costs of Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina.  The human costs may be even greater.  The population of New Orleans today is 30 percent less than what it was before Katrina struck that city more than 10 years ago.  Will a similar fate befall Houston?  We simply do not know.

Donald Trump can talk all he wants about how well the rescue and recovery effort is going, but such cheery self-congratulation rings hollow when it comes from the man who decided to renege on our commitment to the Paris Climate Accord, thereby ignoring the obvious truth that we owe the scope of this and other such calamities to global warming.  Thanks to climate change, the Gulf of Mexico has become one of the warmest bodies of water on the planet.  A major climate scientist recently described the Gulf as a “heat pump,” pushing hot, wet air up into the atmosphere, fueling torrential storms and hurricanes.  This means that another “epic” storm will inevitably strike the Gulf Coast.  It isn’t a question of “if”.  It’s only a question of when, and of how bad the next one will be.

There is no amount of preparation, there is no amount of money, there is no amount of engineering or technological wizardry that can protect a city like Houston.  The Greater Houston Metropolitan Area is larger than the state of Connecticut.  Much of it is below sea level.  No levees, dikes, or dams will ever be sufficient to stave off the catastrophic consequences of the next Harvey.   To pretend otherwise is folly.

The city of Houston—and more broadly, the state of Texas—have made the task of combatting such events harder, not easier.  The Republican governor of Texas and most of its legislators are climate-change deniers beholden to the oil and chemical industries.  In Houston itself, zoning is all but non-existent.  Commercial buildings and strip malls sit cheek-by-jowl with exclusive gated communities and tawdry trailer parks.   In the name of laissez-faire and the free market, developers have been allowed to build on flood plains and swamp lands, where no homes should ever sensibly have been allowed to exist.  Hundreds of square miles have been bull-dozed and paved over, with the result that torrential rains and rising waters have nowhere to go, except into the basements and bedrooms of homeowners.

To make matters worse, the Port of Houston has been allowed to become the entrepôt for at least 30 percent of the nation’s energy imports and exports.  The Houston Ship Channel, which is part of the port, is an environmental disaster—one of the most toxic areas in the country.  It is also a climatological disaster waiting to happen.  Thousands of oil and chemical storage tanks sit along the banks of the channel, with no protection against storms, with little regulation, and with next to no regard for the dangers they pose to the population at large. Through inattention, dereliction, and malfeasance, the economic fortunes of the entire nation have been anchored to a single city and a state that have made economic and environmental bargains with the devil.

We must therefore ask some cruel but inescapable questions.  Should the nation be called upon to pay for the restoration of Houston?  Should we continue to subsidize its bad practices?  Should we any longer allow such a city to exist?

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t for an instant mean to suggest that we should in any way abandon the victims of this catastrophe or fail to do everything we can to help them reconstruct their lives.  The question is not about the people; it is about the place and other places like it.

Hurricane Harvey may be the worst “rain event” in the nation’s history, but that lamentable record won’t hold for long.  It will inevitably be overtaken by other, even more catastrophic events, and those calamities will come sooner rather than later.  Houston will need help again and again, and there will be many other Houston’s.  How many times can we as a nation be called upon to sustain the unsustainable?  As sea levels rise, as storms and torrential rains become more severe, does it make any economic or moral sense to continue throwing good money after bad?

It is long past time that we faced up to the havoc that is yet to come.  If we do not take drastic steps to abate global warming now, by the year 2050, many of our coastal cities will be uninhabitable, the cost will be $30 trillion a year, and the world as we know it will be gone.

If this strikes you as hyperbole, then turn your eyes from what happened along the Gulf Coast of the United States to the infinitely greater tragedy that simultaneously befell Southeast Asia.  A monsoon no less “epic” than Hurricane Harvey swept across India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, killing more than a thousand people, displacing millions, and bringing India’s financial and cultural capital, Mumbai, to a dead stop.

That is the future we face.  We can, of course, ignore it.  We can pretend, as Donald Trump and his minions wish us to do, that climate change is a hoax.  We can continue to rebuild cities that have no sustainable future and perhaps should never have been built in the first place.

All that would be folly.  Unless we act and change our ways, the havoc that came to us last week will be dwarfed by the havoc yet to come.

I recently spent a couple of weeks at the University of Oxford, where I took two courses in political philosophy.  One of my classmates was a Labour Member of Parliament from Australia, who had a wicked sense of humor and was an unapologetic Marxist.  This unlikely combination—a communist with comedic talent, as if Karl and Groucho Marx had been rolled into one—was hard to resist. In any event, we struck up a friendship that led to numerous sidebar conversations, not only about our coursework, but also about political events in general.  During one of these exchanges, my funny friend cast humor aside to express the worry that “identity politics”—based on race, gender, religion or culture—poses a serious, perhaps a fatal, threat to left-leaning political parties throughout the western world.

His observation instantly struck home, since scarcely a day goes by that we do not hear of the Democratic Party’s internal struggle to define, or redefine, itself in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.  Some say that the party should try to recapture the white, working class voters who have been deserting it for decades, like a tide that goes out but never comes back in.  Others say that it should focus on minority and millennial voters, who are more receptive to its philosophy and policies.  Still others say the party should try to fashion an overarching “economic message,” bypassing the differences that divide the various constituencies within its purportedly “broad tent”.  No final or definitive answer has yet emerged, and as the days go by, it seems increasingly unlikely that one ever will.

Such conundrums are not confined to the Democratic Party in the United States.  The Labour parties of Britain and Australia, as well as the Socialist parties of Europe, are grappling with similar questions.  All seem increasingly unanchored and adrift—estranged from their traditional constituencies, uncertain about their fundamental principles, at odds about their policies and priorities.

And even within the United States, the problem is not limited to Democrats.  A different kind of identity politics—one based on ethnic, religious, and gender grievances—has taken hold of the Republicans, who increasingly seem to be at war with themselves regarding ideology and identity.  This is a conflict that has been smoldering from the first day Richard Nixon decided to exploit the racial grievances of white Southerners for the sake of electoral advantage.  This old, scabrous wound of white racism did not begin with Donald Trump, but it undoubtedly got worse after his election.

The foremost American critic of “identity politics” may be Mark Lilla, who teaches at Columbia University and is one of our country’s leading public intellectuals.  In countless lectures, interviews, opinion pieces, and books, he has railed against the dangers posed by the politics of identity, not only to Democrats and liberals, but to liberal democracy itself:

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale.

Lilla is a man of great learning and even greater generosity of spirit.  But even such a man can fail to recognize when history has turned a page.  He fails to see that liberalism can no longer to “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another,” because our political institutions, even when liberals are in charge, increasingly fail to represent the most deeply felt needs and interests of those to whom sexuality and religion, race and ethnicity, are in no sense “narrow” or merely “symbolic” issues.  For millions of Americans, these are the only issues that truly matter.  This is not because they are being willfully selfish; it is because our society has given them no other choice.

Why, for example, should black Americans, after nearly 400 years of slavery, segregation, and suppression, put their faith in a conception of citizenship that still relegates them to the back of the bus?  Why should they subordinate their racial identity when the society in which they live wouldn’t allow them to escape that identity even if they wanted to?

Why should Mexican immigrants, whose ancestors once owned a large swath of this country and whose labor now feeds much of it, put their faith in a government or a president that denounces them as criminals, rapists, and murderers?  Why should they subordinate their ethnic identity to a citizenship that many of them will never be allowed to attain?

Why should women be asked to surrender their identity as women when, a century after they were given the right to vote, they continue to be paid less for doing the same job as a man, when a cabal of 13 white men in the Senate of the United States can still gather in secret and presume to tell them how they should make their reproductive decisions?

Why should gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans be asked to set aside their sexual identities when they continue to be denounced as sick or sinful from countless podiums and pulpits across the land, when the President of the United States seeks to deny some of their number the right to serve this country in the military even as they themselves are willing to put their lives in harm’s way?

If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must ask why such people should be expected to put their faith in an abstract. purportedly greater concept of “citizenship” that fails to deliver on its most basic promises.  How long should we expect them to wait patiently until our democracy finally decides to treat them as true equals, with the justice and respect they deserve, not only as “citizens,” but as fellow human beings?

Our governing institutions, our two main political parties, indeed our entire political and economic system are in trouble, because they have grown deaf and blind to such realities.  A recent study by Harvard University found that a majority of millennial voters see little value in capitalism, and a third would prefer to live under socialism—a finding that would have been utterly unthinkable when I was growing up and a clear signal that something has gone fundamentally wrong with politics as usual.  Asked about this finding, the Democratic Leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, proclaimed:  “We’re all capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”  Her response tells you all you need to know about the underlying problem.

The shop-worn ideological clichés of politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan are no longer relevant to millions of Americans.  Their promises and principles not only lack credibility, they no longer matter.  That is why their respective parties are in turmoil.  And that is why those parties are struggling to define, or redefine, themselves.  It is all too clear that they are struggling, not to “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens,” but merely to hang onto power.  The time has therefore come for these moribund political parties to go.  Like the great extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, identity politics may turn out to be the instrument of their destruction.   I, for one, would greet their extinction, not with dread, but with relief.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s shocking rant just 48 hours ago about the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which he sought to equate the motives and behavior of Neo-Nazis and white racists with those who gathered to protest against them, Republicans have finally begun to speak out.  A few have denounced the president directly.  More, like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have confined their denunciations to the evils of racism and bigotry without denouncing the evil-doer himself.  The latter have been criticized, and justly so, for failing to draw the obvious connection between the bigoted rhetoric of the president and the murderous violence in Charlottesville.

Even if Republicans like Ryan and McConnell had named Trump explicitly, however, that would not have been enough.  In an era of non-stop television news coverage, never-ending Twitter storms, and metastatic social media, it has become too easy to confuse verbal posturing with action, to imagine that saying is as good as doing.  It is not.

Now that Donald Trump has nakedly revealed himself to be what we always suspected he was—to wit, an out-and-out racist—far more than words of condemnation are called for.  Words, no matter how direct, are not enough.

Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and members of the Ku Klux Klan must be stopped in their tracks.  There are no “very fine people” (to use Trump’s words) in their ranks.  They are nothing less than terrorists, in fact or in the making.  As such, they should be investigated, disarmed, indicted where evidence of criminal behavior exists, and, if found guilty, locked away for as long as it takes.  More broadly, their hate speech and hateful regalia should be banned as incitements to violence.  This is the approach adopted by Germany, a country which knows where this kind of virulence can lead.

Donald Trump must also be stopped in his tracks.  It is no longer possible to dismiss Trump’s behavior as impulsiveness or to excuse his rhetoric as mere bravado and bluster that shouldn’t be taken seriously.  It is abundantly clear that a defiant and unapologetic racist now sits in the Oval Office, and, after what happened in Charlottesville, to pretend otherwise is pernicious nonsense.  Whatever slender moral claim Trump may once have had to serve as president is now utterly gone.  He squandered it the moment he decided, against all common sense and all sense of common decency, to defend the indefensible.

Those who serve in the Trump administration must, if they have any conscience or courage, resign and walk away.  It is no longer excusable to hang on, in the hope of achieving some lofty policy or legislative goal.  It is no longer tenable to say that service to the country should supersede qualms about the man in the Oval Office.  It is no longer credible to suppose that this man can be contained, taught, or improved by having level-headed “adults in the room”.  Donald Trump is a national disgrace, and only disgrace will come to those who continue to serve him.

Republicans in Congress who have abetted or enabled Trump to achieve their political objectives must, if they have any shred of conscience or courage, turn their backs on a man who is destroying both their party and the country.  They can no longer pretend that he is anything other than what he is:  a racist demagogue, who would readily tear this country apart to protect himself and hang onto power.  If Republicans fear the wrath of Trump’s “base,” it is time they realized that such people are precisely what Hillary Clinton once pronounced them to be: a “basket of deplorable’s.”  To continue coddling and cultivating these people will produce nothing but grief, both for the Republican Party and for the United States of America.

Those in the administration and in Congress who continue to serve or tolerate this president must ask themselves how they will someday explain their behavior to their children and grandchildren.

How will Mike Pence, a supposedly devout Christian, explain his support of a race-baiting bigot who profanes every moral principle taught by Jesus?

How will Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, both devout Jews, justify their continued service in the administration of a president who defends virulent anti-Semites?

How will military men like John Kelly and H. R. McMaster, who have sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution, have spent their lives defending the nation, and presumably value personal honor above all else, explain their passive submission to the whims of a cowardly demagogue who would tear up the Constitution if he could?

It is no longer possible for such people to bob and weave, to duck for cover and hope that all will somehow and someday turn out for the best.  If they do not turn their backs on Donald Trump soon, we will know that these people are mere poseurs, that their principles are fictions.

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that a president may be removed from office if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of that office.  It does not define the meaning of the word, “unable,” let alone limit that meaning to physical or mental incapacity.  A president who has lost any semblance of moral authority is no less “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of his office than one who has lost his health or his mind.

That is precisely the situation we now confront.  Donald Trump’s moral authority is gone; he is therefore no longer capable of discharging the powers and duties of his office.  Those who choose to deny this reality and refuse to act accordingly will betray themselves, and they will betray the country.

Forty-eight hours ago, the Congress of the United States adjourned for its summer recess.  By all accounts, members of both the House and the Senate, particularly those on the Republican side, were relieved to escape not only the notoriously oppressive summer weather of the nation’s capital, but even more so the stormy weather emanating from the increasingly chaotic and floundering presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Their respite will not last long.  In little more than a month, lawmakers will return to Washington to face solemn and inescapable decisions—about the fate of a sitting president, about the survival of our democracy, about the future of the nation itself.  They will be returning to face nothing less than a constitutional crisis, the likes of which we have not seen since the Civil War.  For Democrats, the task will be easy.  For Republicans, who control both Houses of Congress and thus the future of our republic, the opposite will be the case.  They will need to decide, once and for all, whether they intend to act as partisans or as patriots.

It doesn’t take a fortune teller to foresee the onset of this crisis, because the auguries of what is to come are abundantly clear to anyone who is willing to open his eyes.  It is clear, for example, that Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, is homing in.  From the résumés of the legal team he has assembled, we can deduce that Trump’s entourage and almost certainly Trump himself have become targets of investigation, not only for possible obstruction of justice, but for financial crimes and, in particular, financial crimes involving Russians.  And from Mueller’s recent impaneling of a special grand jury in Washington, we can conclude that criminal indictments are sure to follow.

Trump’s spokespeople and spin-masters would like us to believe that the impanelment of a new special grand jury signifies nothing unusual or surprising, was only to be expected, and may well lead to nothing.  Such claims are either delusional or designed to distract.  The notion that Mueller’s grand jury may fold its tent and go home quietly, having accomplished little of consequence, may theoretically be the case.  In practice, however, more than 99 percent of federal grand juries return criminal indictments.  Trump’s lawyers surely know this and no less surely have communicated this knowledge to their client.

This is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.  For 30 years, he has been chiseling and double-dealing, defrauding his investors, lenders, contractors, and employees.  He and his family members have grown rich by accepting millions from, and laundering the millions of, countless Russian mobsters and oligarchs.  There is little doubt that they have bribed foreign officials or have been bribed in return, and that, in all likelihood, is why Trump has refused, and still refuses, to release his tax returns.  Buried in all that paper are too many telltale breadcrumbs.

Robert Mueller is now following those bread crumbs, one crumb at a time.  His newly impaneled grand jury can, and undoubtedly will, subpoena Trump’s financial records, including his tax returns, along with the financial records of everyone connected with Trump and his family.  This will begin the unraveling of decades of deceit.  Trump’s record of corruption and criminal behavior will be exposed to the sanitizing sunlight, and he will shrink and shrivel as a result.

Donald Trump knows this.  Which is undoubtedly why he has become so desperate.  Which is why he is doing everything in his power to stop Robert Mueller in his tracks.

Trump’s strategy for accomplishing that purpose is already clear.  He and his surrogates have launched a relentless attack on the integrity of Mueller himself, the team he has assembled, and the FBI as an institution.  To his rabid followers, Trump has proclaimed that he is the victim of a “witch hunt,” and that they are being “cheated” by an unnamed cabal of elite Washington insiders, determined to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election.  To those who leak to the press, and to journalists who report those leaks, Trump and his Attorney General are now delivering threats of subpoena, arrest, and prosecution.

Let there be no doubt that, in these machinations, Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for the eventual firing Robert Mueller.  Despite all the admonitions of the political establishment, despite warnings from Republican Senators like Lindsay Graham and John McCain, despite the conventional wisdom that Donald Trump could not, would not do the unthinkable, he ultimately will do precisely that.  Because, in the final analysis, he will have no choice.  Donald Trump cannot allow the Mueller investigation to go forward, because he, and he alone, knows where it will lead.

And that is why, in five weeks’ time, Republican lawmakers will return to Washington, confronting a constitutional crisis.  Whether they are up to the challenge remains to be seen.  But if they fail, if they decide to circle the wagons around Donald Trump for partisan advantage, if they refuse to put the country first, they will go down in history as cowards.  We can only hope that the country does not go down with them.

With summer well underway, several million American tourists will visiting Europe, more than a few for the first time.  Many will return in slack-jawed wonder, awed by the immaculate roads, the fast and efficient trains and trams, the sprawling parks, the vast public spaces, and the magnificent monuments and museums that adorn the great cities of the continent.  They will come home, asking themselves why we, who live in the richest country on earth, cannot achieve something similar?

Why are our roads and bridges crumbling?  Why are we condemned to waste hundreds of hours stuck in traffic on highways riddled with potholes?  Why are the few trains we have little more than slow, lumbering hulks that lurch their way along miles of decrepit and dangerous track?  Why are so many of our largest cities blighted by trash, mile upon mile of cheap strip malls, and sheer ugliness?

There are other, less obvious, questions that might be asked, about the wretched state of our social as well as our physical assets. Why, for example, does the United States of America have the most expensive healthcare system in the world but some of the worst health statistics?  Why does the quality of our educational system lag behind nearly every major European country, not to mention Asian dynamos like Singapore? Why do the Europeans, and particularly the Scandinavians, appear to be so much happier and satisfied by their lives?

These are complex and vexing questions, of course, and simplistic answers would be misleading.  Nonetheless, one of the principal answers is a subject that we Americans are reluctant to discuss.  That answer is taxation.

We are constantly told that we pay some of the highest taxes in the world, that our tax dollars are being wasted, that cutting taxes would unleash entrepreneurial energy and lead to an economic boom, that such a boom would not only provide greater prosperity for everyone but solve much of what seems to ail the country.

Right-wing ideologues have been spinning this fairly tale for at least 30 years.  Indeed, the major rationale for the disastrous health care proposal now on offer in the Senate is that tax cuts for the richest Americans will somehow unfetter the free market, improve healthcare, lower medical costs, and drive down insurance premiums.  How all this is supposed to work in the real world is never explained.  Rather, it is asserted as a self-evident truth.

Every time this fairy tale has been put into practice, however, it has proved to be hopelessly and disastrously wrong.  There is little historical evidence that lower taxes fuel economic growth, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the free market is capable of providing quality health care at an affordable price.  If that were the case, then such a system would now be at work somewhere in the world.  No such system exists.

Although Republicans are correct when they say that our three principal “entitlement” programs—Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security—may someday become unsustainable, the problem doesn’t lie with the programs themselves.  It lies with the shop-worn “solutions” Republicans invariably propose:  (1) cut benefits to “rein in spending”; (2) cut taxes to “boost the economy”; (3) privatize government programs to produce more “efficiency”.  The heretical thought never seems to occur to these ideologues that a simpler, far more “efficient” solution would simply be to raise taxes and generate more revenue.

The main reason our physical and social infrastructure is such bad shape is that, far from paying some of the highest taxes in the world, we pay some of the lowest.  The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—OECD, for short—is a body of the 35 most advanced economies in the world, of which we are one.  The average tax burden in those countries—including all national, state, regional, and local taxes—is 36 percent of GDP.  The tax burden in the United States is 27 percent.  The only countries with lower tax burdens are Turkey, Chile, and Mexico, which scarcely qualify as models to be emulated.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, with a total tax burden of 50 percent, is Denmark.  Despite this “burden,” per capita wealth in Denmark is considerably higher than in the United States, that wealth is distributed more equitably, and in study after study, the egalitarian Danes declare themselves to be far more satisfied with the quality of their lives.

It is not my intention to suggest that a small, homogenous country of scarcely six million people at the northern edge of Europe can fairly be compared with a nation of more than three hundred million sprawling across an entire continent.   Denmark is not the United States of America.

But neither is the United States of America in any sense “normal”.   On the contrary, our fixation with cutting taxes at the expense of the most basic public investments is decidedly abnormal when compared with other advanced nations.  If we raised our taxes, not to the level of Denmark, but merely to the OCED average, we would produce an additional two trillion dollars a year:  enough to slash the national debt, balance the budget, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and secure the future of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

We can continue to bemoan the fact that our crumbling infrastructure and inadequate public services resemble those of backward and underdeveloped nations, all the while we refuse to invest in them.   We can continue to lament the fact that we are financially underwater, all the while we refuse to pay down our deficits and debts.   We can continue to pretend that we are overtaxed, all the while we are woefully undertaxed.

As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.  As long as we refuse to pay the price of living in a modern, decent society, we will get what we deserve.  Which is exactly nothing.