gracchusdixit

After weeks of tense, almost terrified anticipation, French voters finally went to the polls to choose their new president.  Unlike their American counterparts, the French overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the centrist, Emmanuel Macron, rejecting the extreme nationalism and xenophobia of his opponent, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front Nationale, a neo-fascist political party founded by her unapologetically racist father nearly 40 years ago.

This was the third European election in as many months—the others took place in the Netherlands and Austria—to reject the allure of right-wing nationalism in favor of liberal democracy and the “European project.”  It was also far and away the most important.

France is the second largest economy on the continent and has the largest military force.  Along with Germany, it was the principal architect of the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union.  Had Marine Le Pen won, it is all but certain that she would have turned her back on the European Union and NATO, leading to the disintegration of the political and economic order that has given Europe peace and prosperity for more than half a century.  No wonder, then, that a giant sigh of relief could be heard in one European capital after another when the election results were announced.

We would be deluding ourselves, however, to imagine that France or Europe are out of the woods.  Many French voters went to the polls, holding their long, Gallic noses, voting for Macron, not out of enthusiasm, but solely to oppose Le Pen. Voter turn-out, though astoundingly high by American standards, was comparatively anemic.  Millions, particularly voters on the left, did not vote at all.  Feeling betrayed by their current president, Francois Hollande—a faux socialist, who promised fundamental economic and social change but delivered neither—they saw in Emanuel Macron more of the same.  The ominous fact remains that Marine Le Pen, though defeated decisively, won more votes than her party has ever won.  It is therefore clear that she and the Front Nationale are down but definitely not out.

Then, there is the problem of how Macron will actually govern.  His party—La République En Marche!—is less a party than a movement or, to put it less charitably, a public relations facade, created little more than a year ago for the sole purpose of advancing his candidacy.  A month from now, the French will go the polls again to elect their parliament or National Assembly.  Macron has promised that En Marche! will field candidates in every electoral district.  That is unlikely.  Without a constituency in the National Assembly to back him up, it is difficult to see how Macron will be able to get anything done.

France aside, the European Union that Macron supports has yet to come to terms with its own internal flaws and contradictions.  There is little doubt that the EU is one of the most enlightened, effective, and consequential institutions in the otherwise bleak and lamentable course of human history.  It has given the once war-torn continent of Europe decades of peace.  It has produced unprecedented prosperity. It has abolished countless barriers and obstacles that once separated nations and peoples.  And more than all of that, it has become what the United States of America once thought itself to be—a “City upon a Hill”—a force for reason, tolerance, and social responsibility.

But the European Union is far from perfect.  In particular, its adherence to neoliberal economic orthodoxy has led to unsustainable inequalities, not only within nations, but between nations.  Under the EU economic regime, northern Europe—Germany, most of all—has grown rich, while southern Europe has been demonized and punished.  There are those in Germany who would like the world to believe that these inequalities are the result of a moral difference between “hard-working” northerners and “lazy slackers” in the south.  The truth is otherwise.

The creation of the European Union—and of the euro, specifically—was a gift to countries like Germany.  It instantly devalued their currencies, made their exports less expensive, boosted their economies, and poured billions into the pockets and bank accounts of their citizens.  Until countries like Germany are willing to acknowledge how much of their prosperity is owed to the European Union, until they accept responsibility for helping their European neighbors, the fundamental problems of the European Union will never be solved.

All that said, what the citizens of France just decided to do—and what the citizens of the Netherlands and Austria decided to do just weeks ago—is quite astonishing and constitutes a sharp rebuke to the citizens of the United States.  We faced a choice, and Europeans faced a similar choice.  We chose a narcissistic, authoritarian bully to become our president.  They chose tolerance, decency, and democracy—even when it conflicted with their own economic interests.

Once upon a time, we imagined ourselves to be that “City upon a Hill” that was destined to provide moral leadership to the world.   With Donald Trump in the White House, with Jeff Sessions heading up the Department of Justice, with Rex Tillerson as Secretary of States, with corrupt cronies beyond counting running our country and lining their pockets, that time is clearly gone.  It is up to Europe now.  And thanks to the citizens of France, Europe still has a chance.

Just weeks after Republicans humiliated themselves by failing to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, which they had been promising to do for seven years and which Donald J. Trump promised to do “on day one” of his new administration, they went at it again and succeeded, at least in the House of Representatives.  This, despite the fact that Trump and Republican leaders in both houses of Congress, acknowledging their initial failure, had conceded that “Obamacare” would continue to be the law of the land for the foreseeable future.

What changed the equation was Trump’s mounting anxiety that he had come away from this debacle looking like a “loser.”  As his desire to accomplish something, anything, in the first few months of his presidency grew more desperate, the bill was resurrected.  It is doubtful that Trump himself had, or has, the slightest clue about the details of the legislation.  Certainly, none of the promises he made to his “base” are in the bill that just won narrow approval in the House.  If anything, this version is even more dreadful than the last, as difficult as that is to imagine.

Among its many cruel conditions, the new version of the “American Health Care Act” allows states to opt out of key provisions of the ACA, to drop Medicaid for the poorest of their citizens, and to jettison mandatory coverage of those with pre-existing conditions, pushing them into “high risk pools,” which will be prohibitively expensive for any but the richest of the rich.  Republicans claim that these changes will provide “flexibility,” “choice,” and “access.”  Their actual effect, however, will be to make health insurance unaffordable for millions.  It is no exaggeration to say that many thousands will die as a result.

The last attempt to “repeal and replace” the ACA failed, because it was enormously unpopular.  All across the land, Republican legislators found themselves confronted by thousands of angry constituents, whose ire reflected the fact that a large majority of Americans now want to keep and improve the ACA rather than repeal and replace it. Why, one must therefore ask, were Republicans so determined to press ahead with an alternative that delivers none of the “improvements” their newly elected president promised?

We cannot turn to Donald Trump for the answer, because it is abundantly clear that he doesn’t even understand the question.  His promises were empty from the start, and their sole purpose was self-promotion.

Nor can we look to normal political calculation for the answer.  Some pundits say that Republicans, after seven years of failing to overturn the ACA, were desperate to avoid another failure, which might lead to primary challenges from candidates on the far right.  This may make sense for Republicans in completely safe “red” districts.  But for those who barely won election or reelection last November—who number in the dozens—it makes no sense at all.  They will be going home this weekend to face even more outrage from constituents now fully aware of how much they are about to lose.

The real answer to the question can be found elsewhere, in a statement by Mo Brooks, a tea party congressman from Alabama and a leading member of the “freedom caucus.”  As odious as his opinions are, Brooks is at least honest enough to state them openly:

My understanding is that it (the American Health Care Act) will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, you know, they are doing the things to keep their bodies healthy.  And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.

You couldn’t ask for a clearer or more chilling articulation of Republican ideology with respect to health care.  It comes down to this:  if you’re sick, it’s your fault; others, who’ve “done things the right way,” shouldn’t have to help you.

This isn’t a political ideology in the normal sense.  It is a moral and theological one.

I say “theological,” because Republican ideas about health care—not to mention taxes, education, welfare, law enforcement, and social justice in the broadest sense—rest on assumptions that are fundamentally religious.

The United States of America is, far and away, the most religious nation in the advanced world.  Three quarters of Americans classify themselves as Christians, half as Protestants, and more than a quarter as evangelical, fundamentalist, or “born again.”  Their views about the world, about human behavior, about right and wrong, are saturated with religious presuppositions and prejudices.

Whether they know it or not, politicians like Mo Brooks are following in the footsteps of a specific religious tradition and, in particular, a tradition laid down by the Reformation theologian John Calvin.

Born in France, Calvin fled to Switzerland in 1533 to escape persecution after breaking with the Catholic Church.  Like Martin Luther before him, Calvin became one of the leading figures of the Protestant Reformation.  But Calvin went further.   Luther’s aim was to cleanse and purify Catholic doctrine.  Calvin set out to repudiate and replace it.

His most provocative tenet was “predestination”—the notion that god randomly chooses or “elects” some to receive his gifts and, no less randomly, rejects others, all to please himself, all without regard for right or wrong.  In Calvin’s words:

All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.

For centuries, the Catholic Church insisted on a moral link between behavior and consequences, between virtue and reward, between sin, penitence, and redemption.  Calvin upended all that.  He proclaimed, in effect, that material success is an incontrovertible sign of god’s grace.  If you are wealthy and healthy, god made you so; for anyone to question such good fortune is to question god himself.

This, in effect, is what people like Mo Brooks would now like us to believe—not that virtue is its own reward but, rather, that rewards are a sign of virtue.  He and other Republicans in Congress, who just condemned millions of Americans to fear, sickness, and poverty, are Calvinists one and all.  Their callous cruelty is beyond redemption.

Amidst all the stumbling and fumbling of Donald Trump’s first 100  days in the White House, one part of his administration has been moving forward with ruthless speed and pitiless efficiency—the Department of Justice. The new leader of that department, former Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, made it clear from the moment he was sworn into office that what he refers to as “law and order,” rather than “justice,” was going to be his top priority.  Sessions has been remarkably forthright about his agenda, which is to transform the Department of Justice into the instrument of what amounts to a police state.  Instead of protecting ordinary Americans from the overreach of government or the oppressions of powerful private interests, Sessions aims to vastly expand the power of precisely those interests and to control or cow those who oppose them.

In a speech delivered at the border between the United States and Mexico, Sessions heralded what he called “a new era, the Trump era,” in which he promised to strangle the flow of undocumented immigrants and to clamp down on what he wants us to believe is a crime wave of historic proportions.  In the official text of his speech, which was leaked to the press before he actually delivered it, Sessions described undocumented immigrants as “filth.”  When it actually came time to deliver the speech, however, he flinched, dropping the word “filth,” no doubt because he realized at the last moment how incendiary such an epithet would be.

Despite this last-minute act of self-censorship, there is no way to sugarcoat the dismal reality of what Jeff Sessions thinks, believes, intends to do, and is already doing.  He is a man who flagrantly lied about his Russian connections during his confirmation hearings and thereby committed perjury by any normal understanding of the term.  He got away with it, because the Senate of the United States was too cowardly to embarrass one of its own.  Having got away with his lie, he is now emboldened.

Sessions is an unapologetic white racist, whose prejudices are so sweeping and deep-seated that he either fails to recognize or refuses to acknowledge them.  When a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives voted to gut one of the most fundamental provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he hailed that decision as “good news for the South,” as if the Civil War had never taken place, as if slavery had never existed, as if Jim Crow had never suppressed the rights or threatened and taken the lives of countless black Americans.

Sessions insists that our country is facing a crime wave that simply doesn’t exist, unless by “crime” he means those who exercise their constitutional right to demonstrate against Donald J. Trump and the countless local police departments across the land who routinely victimize anyone who isn’t lily white.

He declares that Hispanic immigrants are agents of “depravity,” whereas most of them are simply trying to escape from the true danger and depravity that beset the countries from which they are fleeing.  Remarkably few undocumented immigrants commit any crimes once they are here.  Indeed, their malefactions pale in comparison with the criminal behavior of native-born white Americans. The truth of the matter is that undocumented immigrants are the most exposed, vulnerable, and fearful people in the country.  The last thing most of them want is an encounter with the cops.

Sessions claims that local police officers have been “demoralized” by Justice Department consent decrees designed to ensure that their practices abide by the Constitution and the law, as if the “morale” of police officers somehow supersedes their obligations to treat all citizens—and immigrants—with respect and due process.  He attributes countless examples of systematic and egregious police racism to “a few bad apples.”  Try telling that to the citizens of Ferguson, Missouri, or Chicago, Illinois.

He asserts that marijuana is a “gateway drug,” leading to the hellish pit of heroin or cocaine addiction.  There is no evidence whatsoever to support this claim, nor is there any evidence that mass incarceration for minor drug offenses does anything to prevent or reduce serious criminal activity.

Finally, Sessions proclaims that the federal government has no business interfering with local and state law enforcement, invoking the doctrine of “states’ rights.”  This is the oldest trick in the long, lamentable history of white racism in our country and is the clearest signal of Jeff Sessions’ true intentions and utter hypocrisy.  He invokes “states’ rights” only when it suits his purpose and rails against that principle when it stands in his way.   On the one hand, he would deny the federal government any role in reining in the misbehavior of local or state police departments that are blatantly racist or corrupt.  On the other hand, he wants to strip funding from local or state police departments that do not toe the line when it comes to deporting immigrants.  All the while Jeff Sessions proclaims the sanctity of “states’ rights,” he deplores the notion of “sanctuary” states or cities.  He wants to have it both ways—as long as that means his way.

It is abundantly clear that, to Jeff Sessions and his godfather, Donald J. Trump, “justice” is nothing more than a political term of art, a synonym for prejudice backed by intimidation and force.   Sessions believes in justice only for the Americans he approves of and for no one else.  If you are brown or black, gay or lesbian, if you choose to smoke a joint rather than guzzle a six-pack, if you dare to ask a question when you’re pulled over by a swaggering cop, if you even for a second raise a finger to help an undocumented immigrant, it’s time to lock your door, draw the curtains, and hide in the basement.  The storm troopers are on their way.  Listen for the sound of their boots.

Bill O’Reilly, the most watched commentator on cable news, has been fired by Fox News Channel, after revelations that he and his employer paid out at least $13 million to settle five lawsuits accusing him of sexual harassment.   Before this particular episode, O’Reilly had a long history of sexual misbehavior, much like his former boss, Roger Ailes.   Although Fox finally clamped down on Ailes, it continued to turn a blind eye to O’Reilly’s behavior, because he was far and away the network’s biggest audience draw.  That stratagem became untenable when scores of major advertisers, under intense public pressure from protestors and activists, decided to pull out of O’Reilly’s prime time show and began hinting they might withdraw all their business from Fox News Channel.  Television ratings are worthless if they can’t be monetized, and in the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox, money always has the last word.  Thus it came to pass that O’Reilly came tumbling down.

His demise raises innumerable questions—not only about Fox News Channel but about everything it represents.

Fox News Channel began life 20 years ago as a long-odds upstart hoping to challenge CNN, which had invented the idea of wall-to-wall cable news coverage.  In those early days, you would have had to look long and hard to find anyone who thought Fox had even a ghost of a chance.  I certainly didn’t.  When Fox News Channel was getting started, I had already spent more than twenty years in the television business, and my best assessment of its chances at the time was both slim and grim.

But I was wrong.  Like many others, I was a victim of conventional wisdom and conventional thinking.

The one person who defied that thinking was Roger Ailes, Fox News Channel’s founding father. To liberals, Ailes qualifies as an evil genius.  The evil resides in his political views and deplorable personal behavior.  The genius resides in his uncanny knack for manipulating public opinion.

From the beginning, Ailes knew precisely what he wanted Fox News Channel to become, and in Bill O’Reilly, he found the perfect embodiment of that vision.  Within a few years of O’Reilly’s arrival, Fox News Channel was an upstart no longer.  It had become not only the center of the right-wing political universe but a money-making machine without precedent in the history of the television news business, producing annual profits of more than a billion dollars.  No other national news organization—not ABC, not CBS, not NBC, certainly not CNN—had ever raked in so much cash.

What O’Reilly’s departure portends for the future of Rupert Murdock’s biggest profit center is anybody’s guess.   Tonight, his place will be taken by Tucker Carlson, who, apart from his political opinions, couldn’t be more starkly different from the man he is replacing.  For almost 20 years, O’Reilly brilliantly played the part of a perpetually aggrieved middle-aged white male—a lavishly paid but endlessly grumpy Archie Bunker.  This “act”—and it surely has to have been an “act”—was never terribly convincing to anyone with open eyes or an ounce of common sense.  But to the sightless germs that squiggle about in the petri dish called the Fox News audience, O’Reilly was the fulfillment of their every primordial wish.

Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, looks like he just stepped off the pages of a prep school yearbook.  Although he shed his signature bow ties several years ago, everything else about him screams:  entitled, snotty, smug rich kid.  When Carlson inherited Meagan Kelly’s spot in the Fox News line-up, after she had jumped ship for a job at NBC, he did well enough.  But he was sandwiched between two juggernauts, the now defrocked Bill O’Reilly and the still priestly Sean Hannity, who serves as Donald Trump’s principal cheerleader and, when Sean Spicer is embarrassing himself, as Trump’s ex-officio spokesman.  Without that hammock to hold him up, it is unclear how Carlson—or Fox News itself—is going to fare.

Nearly all the talk about O’Reilly has focused on the transgressions of the man himself, the culture of the organization that employed him, and the backstairs maneuvering that led to his demise.  However pruriently interesting these things may be, there is something much bigger going on.

Bill O’Reilly and Fox News Channel all but created today’s Republican Party, and they were largely responsible for creating the political career of Donald J. Trump, who could not have won the presidential election without their help and connivance.

But they did more than that.  In the long-run-up to Trump’s nomination and eventual election, they unleashed a toxic social subculture—long suppressed—that now openly peddles sexism, racism, and authoritarianism, all in the name of patriotism and “law and order.”

The gun-toting, pickup truck-driving, flag-waving denizens of this subculture appear to believe that “real men” and “real Americans” have been subverted by effete and condescending elites, by “uppity” and underserving minorities, by “depraved” homosexuals and cross-dressers, and by feminist women who refuse to play the role assigned to them by that whitest of all white males, the god of the Old Testament.  They dismiss those who refuse to countenance their ignorance and boorishness as “whiners,” “snowflakes,” or “buttercups.”  They disparage any criticism of their blatant prejudices as “political correctness.”

For all this, we have Bill O’Reilly to thank.  We can only hope that he will prove to be the first of many Archie Bunkers to fall.  There is another one waiting, and he is waiting in the White House.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to launch a missile attack on an inconsequential and ill-defended airbase in Syria after that country’s use of toxic chemicals against its own citizens, the chorus of praise from nearly all quarters was instantaneous and deafening.  Members of Congrss from both sides of the aisle pushed and shoved to jump on board.  In the Senate, those steadfast cold warriors, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, heretofore consistently critical of Trump, applauded his “decisiveness.”  Our principal European allies—the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—rushed to express their support.  And wonder of wonders, both Sunni Muslim regimes throughout the Middle East and the government of Israel, which customarily loathe one another even on the best of days, joined the chorus.  Most exuberant of all were the journalistic pundits on television and in print, who pronounced that, by dint of authorizing the launch of several dozen Tomahawk missiles, unmanned but loaded with 1,000-pound warheads, Trump had finally become “presidential” or even—to quote one particularly feverish commentator—“heroic.”

All of this rhetorical huffing and puffing skirts the rather uncomfortable fact that Trump’s unilateral decision to attack a sovereign nation is simply illegal.  Bashar al-Assad is undoubtedly a moral monster, but he poses no threat to the United States of America.  As a consequence, there is no credible legal argument for what Trump decided to do.

The slavish praise for this decision also begs—indeed, it obscures—several questions that are far more consequential than Trump’s “presidential” persona.  Why was this attack authorized?  What was it intended to accomplish?  What did it actually accomplish?  And what happens next?  Despite all the applause, the answers to these questions remain entirely unclear.

Donald Trump would like us to believe that he was so horrified by the images of  innocent women and children writhing in pain that he changed his long-standing opposition to any involvement in the Syrian civil war and felt compelled to act.  This is both implausible and hypocritical.  For years, Trump has been turning a blind eye to the countless horrors of that war as well as the desperate state of its victims.  He repeatedly lectured Barack Obama—via Twitter, of course—against getting involved.  Indeed, just days before missile attack, Trump’s Secretary of State absurdly proclaimed that it was up to the Syrian people to decide the fate of Bashar al-Assad.

Even if we take Trump at his word, even if we accept that, out of the blue, he suddenly changed his mind and decided to help the victims of Syria’s civil war, this attack was no way to go about it.  On the contrary, even as he spoke emotionally about the horrors done to “God’s children,” his administration was proposing to slash our already paltry spending on foreign and humanitarian aid and trying to shut down the admission of Syrian refugees.

Some, particularly “hawkish” Republican politicians like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Marco Rubio, would like us to believe that this attack had some substantial purpose—either to “punish” Bashar al-Assad or to damage the military capabilities of his regime.  If that is the case, then this raid was an expensive fiasco.  No chemical weapons were destroyed, nor was the Syrian air force disabled or even deterred.  Within 24 hours of the attack, Syrian planes were taking off from the very air base American missiles had supposedly obliterated.  There is, moreover, no sign whatever that Assad has been chastened.  On the contrary, he remains as defiant as ever.

Still others, particularly the professional chatterers on television, would like us to think that this attack was designed to “send a symbolic message” of American resolve and military might, not only to Assad, but to the Russians, the North Koreans, the Chinese, and God knows who else.

There are two problems with this facile notion.

The first is that the missile attack Trump authorized accomplished exactly nothing.  If it delivered any sort of “message,” it was that American military might is badly managed or feckless.

The second is that, long before this attack, American military power had lost all credibility in the Middle East.  The invasion of Iraq remains an unmitigated disaster.  The war in Afghanistan is now almost 20 years old and shows no signs of resolving itself anytime soon.  The rise of ISIS is largely the result of our own bungling, and even if we succeed in suppressing its so-called “caliphate,” the snake of Islamic resistance will continue to writhe, wriggle, and bite.

In short, none of the justifications for this attack holds up under even the slightest scrutiny, and those who have rushed to praise it have done the country, and the truth, a disservice.

Underlying all this, Trump’s decision has all the earmarks of a “wag the dog” deception, designed to divert attention from the abysmal record of his presidency thus far and the still unanswered questions about his involvement with the Russians.  Some cynics have even suggested that Trump and Putin colluded to create this diversion.  I am not inclined to go that far, but with Trump, one can never be sure.

That said, and far more consequentially, the drumbeat of support for this attack demonstrates the extent to which our nation and our national identity have become militarized.  In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican and the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, warned against what he described as the “military-industrial complex,” a nexus of financial interests that included the Pentagon, major industrial corporations, and political lobbyists.  Today, his warning seems more prescient than ever.  But it does not fully encompass the danger we now face.  “Ike” warned us against a “complex” that was primarily financial and economic.  The “complex” that threatens us now is more fundamental.  It is both psychological and cultural.  It speaks to the way we imagine ourselves and our role in the world.

Americans have come to accept the proposition that every major geopolitical problem can, and should, be solved with a military response, that war and force and aggression are the only instruments that can overcome seemingly intractable obstacles.  We have become the victims of the trap famously expressed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow:  “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  The problem, of course, is that we have decided to spend all our money on hammers, while very few of the world’s problems are nails.  Syria is no exception.

Given that Republicans control not only the White House but both houses of Congress, their failure to fulfill a seven-year-old promise to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act came as a stunning shock.  This failure exposed deep and persistent fissures that continue to divide a political party which, just weeks ago, seemed unified by the improbable electoral victory of Donald Trump and positively giddy at the prospect of at long last being able to enact its cherished legislative agenda—an agenda designed to roll back not only Obamacare but every aspect of the social contract that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal nearly a century ago.

But this debacle revealed far more than that.  It exposed, once and for all, the fundamental fraud that lies at the heart of the Trump presidency.

Trump’s basic “pitch” to the American electorate was this:  Vote for me, because I’m a rich, successful businessman, I’m a “great negotiator,” I know how to get things done, I’m a “winner.”  As he never tired of telling his slavering and adoring crowds:  “We will have so much winning if I am elected that you may get bored with winning.”

The humiliating collapse of the Republican health care bill demonstrates with stark clarity that Donald J. Trump, far from being a winner, is an incompetent and clueless loser.

The first signal came several weeks ago when he breezily announced:  “Nobody ever knew health care could be this complicated.”  To which, the only reasonable response was:  Duh!

It quickly became apparent that Trump hadn’t even read the bill he was touting and was therefore unprepared to persuade reluctant Republicans as to its merits—assuming it had any.  Instead, he tried to bluster, bully, and intimidate.  First, he threatened nay-sayers with the prospect of electoral catastrophe in 2018 if they didn’t play ball.  When that threat didn’t work, he dispatched his henchmen, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, to demand that the bill be taken or left as it had been written.  When even these feckless tactics failed, Trump metaphorically threw up his hands, declaring:  “We have learned a lot about the vote-getting process.”  It apparently didn’t occur to him that the time to learn about the “vote-getting process” was before the votes were needed, not after they failed to materialize.

Nor was this particular defeat a singular or exceptional humiliation.  Virtually everything Trump has touched since taking the oath of office has turned to ashes and dust.  His ill-considered Muslim ban ground to a halt in the Federal Courts immediately, and the revised second version has met the same fate.  His “big, beautiful wall” is not only not going to be paid for by the Mexicans, it appears increasingly unlikely that it will be paid for by Republicans in Congress.  His cabinet appointees have turned out to be vacuous, ineffectual, or ethically disastrous.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to the Senate during his confirmation hearings.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson embarrassed himself during his first trip abroad, to Asia, and is now being called “the phantom Secretary” by our closest allies.  Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is mired in scandal because of his investments in the Bank of Cyrus, which notoriously launders money for Russian oligarchs and criminals, not to mention Paul Manafort, who for five months was Donald Trump’s campaign manager.

To top it all off, there is the intractable problem that Trump and his closest confidantes are being investigated by the FBI for possibly “coordinating” with the Russians to tip the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.  No matter how often Trump dismisses all this as a “hoax,” no matter how much he tries to obstruct its course or cover his tracks, the stench of scandal simply will not go away.  In this, as in everything else, Donald J. Trump is proving to be singularly incompetent.

To anyone who bothered to take even a cursory glance at Trump’s career before he lunged into politics, his “pitch” to the electorate was absurd on its face.  Trump has never been the “winner” that he claims to be.  He is instead—to use the one word that he probably hates the most—a perpetual “loser.”  He has declared bankruptcy six times.  The list of his business failures is endless.  The number of investors he has hoodwinked and bilked is beyond counting.

Nor does he come even remotely close to being a member of the rarified club of the genuinely rich and famous, who dominate the landscape of his natural habitat, New York City.  He has never been invited to join the board of even one of New York’s premier cultural or artistic institutions.  He has never been recognized, let alone honored, by any of its major charitable or philanthropic organizations. To those who populate the world of money, power, and prestige in the “Big Apple,” Trump, far from being the billionaire business mogul he pretends to be, is, and always has been, a low-rent huckster, operating at the margins.

In MGM’s glorious 1939 rendering of the Wizard of Oz, the defining moment comes when Dorothy and her companions pull back the curtain, only to discover that “the Great and Powerful Oz,” the wizard who has held the kingdom in thrall, is nothing more than a bumbling carnival barker from Kansas.

Thanks to the debacle of “Trumpcare,” we have experienced our own version of this defining moment.  If Donald Trump has any particular skill or talent, it has little to do with creating enduringly successful businesses and has everything to do with conning people into believing that he is what he pretends to be.  The charitable word for his skill is “salesmanship.”  The more accurate word is “fraud.”

Thanks to the debacle of “repeal and replace,” the curtain has been pulled back, and we have seen the tawdry reality that underpins “the Great and Powerful Oz.”  It is not too late to send him back to where he came from.

After eight years of whining about the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, Republicans have finally announced a plan to “repeal and replace” it.  Realizing how furious the backlash to their Puritanically cruel proposal is likely to be, they are doing everything possible to mask its consequences.  They have pushed preliminary “mark-ups” of the bill through two committees without the Congressional Budget Office having had the opportunity to “score” its costs or assess its effects.  They have also jiggered the timetable for implementing the bill to delay its most serious consequences until after the 2018 and 2020 elections, giving them time to do their worst without suffering at the polls.

Despite these evasive and obfuscatory tactics, the impact of what the Republicans are proposing is inescapably clear.  By the time its final pieces fall into place, the “American Health Care Act” will cause at least 15 million Americans to lose their health insurance, millions more will be shouldering higher costs, and the most vulnerable members of our society will be punished.  Those who are young, healthy, or rich will walk away with more money in their pockets, while corporate CEOs and insurance companies will get a huge tax break.  The old, the sick, and the poor will bear the brunt.  It is no exaggeration to say that more than a few of them will go bankrupt or die.  On top of all that, the deficit and national debt will skyrocket, since the Republican plan contains no plausible funding mechanism.

This proposal signifies far more than an attack on Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement; it marks the culmination of their decades-old crusade to unravel every thread of the social safety net that was first stitched together by Franklin Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression and strengthened thereafter by many of his successors in the White House, both Democrats and Republicans.  This latest attack on our social contract nonetheless faces two hurdles.

One is that, now that millions of Americans have experienced its benefits, the Affordable Care Act is more popular than ever.  Without a replacement that leaves the most-appreciated provisions of the ACA intact—which are almost all of its provisions—Republicans are going to face the wrath, not only of Democrats, but of a large swath of their own voters, particularly those who most enthusiastically supported Donald Trump.  The states of West Virginia and Kentucky, for example, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, top the list of ACA recipients.

The second hurdle is that the most conservative elements of the Republican Party are no less incensed than liberals by this legislation, albeit for entirely different reasons.  The so-called tea party, propelled by an avalanche of money from the Koch brothers, is lambasting the AHCA as “Obamacare Lite.”  Libertarians like Rand Paul are outraged that anyone, no matter how rich, should be taxed to provide healthcare to those who simply can’t afford it.  Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama, one of the leading Luddites of the right, has condemned the AHCA as “welfare,” which, to people like Mo Brooks is, by definition, a dirty word.  All this leaves the Republican attempt to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act twisting in the wind.

This shouldn’t be surprising, since the truth of the matter is that, when it comes to fixing what ails our healthcare system, Republicans are clueless and intellectual bankrupt.  Their justification for what they proposing is that the “market” will magically provide more “choice” and more “competition.”  This is disingenuous at best.  The only new “choice” the Republican bill provides is the choice to have no health insurance at all, which will make insurance more expensive for those who have it.  The only new “competition” the bill creates is to allow health insurance companies to operate across state lines.  This has been tried.  It produces no economic benefits and opens well-regulated state markets to shady operators and substandard coverage.

Even if all this were not the case, Republican belief in the “market”—a belief that amounts to the economic equivalent of revealed religion—blinds them to the reality that, when it comes to health care, the free market not only doesn’t work, it doesn’t even exist.

For a market to work properly, there are two requirements: transparency and a level playing field.  Buyers must have easy and equal access to critical information, and both buyers and sellers—or, in this case, providers and patients—must have roughly equal bargaining power.  Adam Smith, the founding father of capitalism, was the first to stipulate these conditions and the first to see that, without them, no market can operate freely or efficiently.  The problem, of course, is that neither of these conditions applies to the transactions between health care providers and their patients.

No patient, however well informed, is in a position to make truly knowledgeable decisions about vital medical procedures, and it is ludicrous to think a patient has the time or wherewithal to “shop around” before making them.  Inevitably, patients must rely on the superior expertise and good faith of their physicians.

Nor can patients reach their decisions on anything that even remotely resembles a level playing field.  By definition, the patient side of the equation, particularly when a serious illness is involved, is one of desperate necessity.  Thus, the notion that market-based competition and choice can produce quality and cost-efficient health care is an illusion at best or a scam at worst.

The more fundamental problem is that the American health care market isn’t a “free market” at all—and never has been.  Why can the CEO of  a local hospital, with no medical training, be paid a hundred or two hundred times the salary of a nurse with twenty or thirty years of experience?  Why can pharmaceutical companies charge prices for life-saving drugs that are a thousand times more than the cost of research and production?  Why can the typical orthopedic surgeon make half a million dollars a year—ten times the income of the average American family—and still complain that he or she isn’t rich enough?

It isn’t a “free market” that makes such decisions—it’s a system of de facto monopolies.  Professional guilds and associations limit the certification and supply of physicians.  Excessive patent protection limits the supply of  drugs.  Mergers and consolidation in the hospital industry drive competitors out of business and drive up costs.  If Republicans were truly interested in bringing competition to the business of health care, their bill would address and attack these market distortions.  Needless to say, it does nothing of the sort.

The current plan on offer in the House of Representative may not pass.  But if some version of it eventually does, Republicans will have succeeded in repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act with an alternative that does absolutely nothing to provide better, more affordable health care.  They will live to regret the day.  Sadly, so will millions of Americans.

Consumed as we are by the frenzied chaos of the Trump White House, few Americans have been able to catch their breath long enough to notice what is happening elsewhere in the western world.  A wave of aggressive, inward-looking nationalism, much like the creed preached by Donald Trump and his Breitbart or Russian handlers, is sweeping across Europe like rolling thunder.

The first thunderclap was heard when a slim majority of the British electorate voted to leave the European Union.  Many Americans were shocked or mystified by this decision, but then promptly forgot about it, because no immediate apocalypse occurred.  It will take years for Britain to unwind its relationship with the EU, and until that unwinding is complete, the full force of this suicidal decision is unlikely to be felt.  When it finally comes,  however, it will come like a whirlwind.

In the meantime, many other, even more serious decisions are coming much faster.

On March 15, the Dutch will vote in a national election.  The head of a far-right,  nationalist party, Geert Wilders, has been surging in the polls and now seems likely to win, for many of the same reasons that swept Trump into power:  hatred of immigrants, suspicion of global institutions, nostalgia for an earlier, supposedly better age.  Because there are a dozen or so political parties in the Netherlands, a coalition is usually required for a government to be formed.  Wilders may not be able to become prime minister, if other parties decline to ally themselves with his provocative agenda.   Even if that happens, however, for Wilders to take the lead in this election would mark a stunning reversal of the tolerant, liberal traditions of the Netherlands.

Five weeks after the Dutch vote, the French will go to the polls.  The French electoral system is unusual, in that it has two rounds.  In the first, a field of presidential candidates—in this case, five—will be winnowed to two, and then, in a second round in early May, the finalists will face off to decide the ultimate result.  It seems all but inevitable that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National, will be one of the finalists.  The Front National is virulently anti-Muslim and anti-European, and Le Pen has promised, if elected, to pull out of the European Union—despite the fact that France all but invented the EU and plays a leading role in its administration.

In July, the last round of financial aid to Greece will expire.  Greece is entering the ninth year of one of the worst economic depressions in history.  Twenty-three percent of its population and 49 percent of its young people are unemployed.  The country’s GDP is half what it was before the depression began.  The average wages of those who lucky enough to have jobs have declined by 30 percent.  Nonetheless, the European Central Bank continues to demand that Greece produce a budgetary surplus large enough to give its lenders a profitable rate of return.  It is no accident that the ECB is controlled by Germany, and it will come as no surprise that German banks top the list of Greece’s lenders.  Since it is all but impossible that Greece will be able to meet these demands, its de facto bankruptcy will inevitably become official, at which point its only option will be to withdraw from the euro and perhaps from the European Union itself.  This could ignite a panic in financial markets.

Two months later, in September, another election will take place, in Germany.  Less than a year ago, it seemed all but certain that Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, would be a shoe-in to retain power.  That is no longer the case.  When Merkel decided to open Germany’s borders to thousands of refugees seeking to escape the murderous chaos of Syria, millions of anti-immigrant Germans balked.   Mutter Angela, the nickname by which she was once affectionately known, has become a slur.  It now seems likely that Merkel and her Christian Democratic Party will not win enough votes to govern alone.  The only plausible coalition partner will be Germany’s socialist party, which is the largest in Europe and steadfastly opposes Merkel’s neoliberal governing philosophy.

Why is all this happening?  What accounts for the social and economic thunder rolling across the western world?

In the run-up to our recent presidential election, the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, declared:  “To stop neofascism, you must stop neoliberalism.”  Whatever else you may think of Jill Stein—and there plenty of reasons to be skeptical of both the candidate and her motives—she was certainly right about this.

The neofascist tendencies of Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and their counterparts throughout Europe, have been fueled by the fundamental flaws of the “neoliberal” economic and social order, which has failed to attend to the needs of ordinary people, creating grotesque inequalities of wealth and income, and subordinating community and country to the profit motives of rootless corporations.

The central intellectual flaw of neoliberalism is its conflation of the liberal political and social ideals of the Enlightenment with a free-market economic agenda.  This confusion has a long pedigree, beginning with Adam Smith in the 18th century.  But its principal architect was an Austrian-born economist named Frances Hayek.  In 1943, Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, his most famous book, in which he asserted that property rights, private enterprise, and the so-called “free market” are the fundamental underpinnings of every other freedom.  He went on to claim, absurdly, that any attempt by government to intervene in the workings of the market is a step in the direction of tyranny, a step on the “road to serfdom.”  We have Hayek to thank for the dismal fact that many Americans reflexively condemn any attempt to reform our ridiculously dysfunctional healthcare system as “socialized medicine.”

No matter what neoliberal ideologues may say, property rights are not the same thing as human rights, the “free market” is not synonymous with a free society, and the social contract between individuals and their government cannot be reduced to a business transaction or a journal entry on a balance sheet.  Until the governing elites here and in Europe come to their senses and acknowledge the failures of the neoliberal order—the  endless financial bubbles and busts, the systemic corruption, the unconscionable redistribution of wealth from the 99 percent to the one percent—the thunder of neofascism will continue to roll.  If these governing elites do not come to their senses soon, lightning will inevitably strike.

Every political ideology needs a corresponding mythology to sustain itself, that is to say, a fictional narrative that attempts to explain reality—or explain it away—and to do so in a fashion that advances its ideological purpose.  For decades, Republicans have been hankering to roll back the social and economic programs of the “New Deal,” instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to cope with the crisis of the Great Depression and expanded by his Democratic successors.  With majorities in both houses of Congress and a compliant Donald Trump in the White House, they now see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact their agenda.

The problem, of course, is that the programs they are determined to destroy—which include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and even the Affordable Care Act—are enormously popular.  Thus, Republican ideologues have had to create a set of myths to mask, and justify, their real intent.  Foremost among these myths is a phony dichotomy between “makers and takers,” between “hard-working Americans” and lazy, undeserving parasites.

Ronald Reagan launched this myth at a campaign rally in 1976 when he lifted a story from the staunchly conservative newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, which had embarked upon a crusade against a woman named Linda Taylor, whom it dubbed a “welfare queen.”  There was no question that Taylor had bilked the system of thousands of dollars; indeed, she ultimately went to prison for that and a variety of other crimes.  Far more questionable, however, was the insinuation that she was in any way typical of the vast majority of people receiving public assistance.  That didn’t stop the Tribune or Reagan from exploiting her bad behavior and turning it into a universal symbol.  The slur, “welfare queen,” promptly became part of the coded language Republicans used for decades to undermine every aspect of the social safety net.

That phrase eventually became unacceptable for its obvious sexist and racist connotations.  So, Republican ideologues had to adjust their terminology.  They eventually settled upon the seductive and alliterative alternative, “makers and takers,” which crudely  but memorably carves up the country into two opposing moral camps: the presumptively productive and deserving versus supposedly undeserving and unproductive parasites.

This malicious slur became more infamous than it already was in 2012, when the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, was secretly videotaped addressing a group of rich donors at a posh hotel in Boca Raton.  Romney did not use the phrase, “makers and takers,” but he expressed the underlying thought with a clarity that he quickly came to regret.  To quote Romney directly:

The President starts out with 48, 49 percent.  He starts off with a huge number.  These are people who pay no income tax.  Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.  So, our message on low taxes doesn’t connect.  So, he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich.  I mean that’s what they sell every four years.  And so, my job is not to worry about those people.  I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

The most damning line in Romney’s riff, of course, was the last one.  For someone like Romney to demean Americans who pay no income taxes for failing to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” was worse than hypocritical; it was absurd.  Romney grew up rich, went to the most exclusive private schools and universities in the country, and never, even for a moment, had to worry about his future, let alone take “personal responsibility” for a life that was handed to him on a silver platter.  It seems never to have occurred to Romney that many Americans were (and are) too poor to pay income taxes or that, as poor as they are, are nonetheless compelled to pay countless other taxes they can’t afford:  on their wages, on the food and clothing they buy, on the gasoline they need to get to work or drive their kids to school.

The ultimate irony in all this is that the defining myth of the Republican Party—the divide between Republican “makers” and Democratic “takers”—is the very opposite of the truth.  The 21 states in which Hillary Clinton won a majority of the votes last November are responsible for producing a majority of our nation’s GDP and paying most of its taxes.   What is more, the Clinton states are net “donors” to the nation’s finances, paying far more in taxes than they receive in benefits from the federal government.  Far from being “takers,” Democratic states and Democratic voters are the nation’s true “makers.”

Clinton won 62 percent of the vote in California, which pays 15 percent more in federal taxes than it gets in return.  She won 59 percent of the vote in New York, which pays 28 percent more in taxes than it gets in return.  She won 60 percent of the vote in Massachusetts, which pays 30 percent more in taxes than it gets in return.  She won 55 percent of the vote in my own state of Connecticut, which, like Massachusetts, pays 30 percent more in taxes than it receives in return from the federal government.

Most of the states that voted for Donald Trump, on the other hand, are like pigs at the proverbial trough, receiving far more in benefits from the federal government than the taxes they pay.  For example, Trump got 58 percent of the vote in Mississippi, which receives 199 percent—that’s right, 199 percent—more in federal benefits than it pays in taxes.  He won 68 percent of the vote in West Virginia, which gets 189 percent more in benefits.  He won 62 percent of the vote in Alabama, which gets 126 percent more from the federal government than it contributes.  And he won 63 percent of the vote in Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, which gets 45 percent more in benefits from the federal government than it pays in taxes.  States like these can afford to cut public services and slash taxes on corporations and their richest citizens, because they know the federal government will step in, transferring wealth and resources from “blue states” to “red states.”

The true “takers” in our society aren’t “welfare queens” like Linda Taylor in Chicago.  They are the states that voted for Donald Trump and the Republican Party which supports him.  Perhaps it’s time the true “makers” in our country decided that enough is enough, and deprived these “takers” of their privileges and their subsidies.  Perhaps it’s time to cut them off, and let the pigs squeal.

Our nation faces an unprecedented constitutional crisis that Republicans in Congress have thus far chosen to enable, ignore or wish away.   Their presidential candidate, the man who now occupies the White House, is neck deep in conflicts of interest, the likes of which we have never seen before.  He owes several hundred million dollars to a government-owned Chinese bank.  Russian oligarchs have poured millions into his businesses.  He has refused to divest himself of his financial and business interests and continues to profit from them, all the while he is dealing with, and sometimes browbeating, foreign leaders who can benefit those interests.  He  is openly using his high office to benefit the money-making schemes of his wife and children or to punish anyone who stands in their way.  All of this violates anti-corruption laws and the “emoluments clause” of the Constitution.

Apart from these blatant conflicts of interest, Trump demonstrated within weeks of his inauguration that he has complete contempt for the Constitution itself.  He is trying to intimidate the judicial branch of government, the independence of which is essential to reining in the power of the executive.  He is threatening the freedom of the press, which is the only private institution to which the Constitution gives explicit protection.  He seems to think that he, and he alone, is entitled to exercise power and that his power must be unchallenged and absolute.

It gets worse.  To anyone who isn’t on intellectual life-support, it should by now be evident that Donald Trump is under the thumb of the Russians, either because he owes them money or because he is being blackmailed.  During the presidential campaign, it was possible to attribute Trump’s unwavering defense of Vladimir Putin to mere vanity, the adoration of one aspiring “tough guy” for another.  That explanation is no longer plausible.  Trump is now the president.  Against all reason, against sober advice, against the nation’s fundamental interests, he continues to excuse, defend, and praise a murderous autocrat who  is our most determined enemy.  If it turns out that Trump’s campaign colluded with a Russian effort to get him elected, it will be treason.

Worse still—if anything can be worse than treason—it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump is mentally unstable, an extreme and dangerous narcissist who cannot be reasoned with, who refuses to acknowledge reality, who will never learn or change.  The 25th Amendment to the Constitution provides a mechanism for removing a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”  This provision has never been invoked.  The time is fast approaching when it must be.

Trump himself is not the only cause of the constitutional crisis we face.  His cabinet nominations amount to a cabinet of horrors.

Betsy DeVos, who was just sworn in as Secretary of Education, is a ideologue whose only qualification for office is the fact she and her family have given $200 million to the  Republican Party and Republican politicians, including many of the senators who voted for her.  She is routinely called a “billionaire philanthropist.”  While she is no doubt a billionaire, she is no “philanthropist.”  DeVos is, instead, an ideological lobbyist, determined to advance a right-wing, evangelical agenda that aims to destroy public education, as she has very nearly done in her home state of Michigan.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s new Attorney General, has a long history of prejudice and discrimination against the civil and voting rights of African-Americans, women, and gays.  He refuses to condemn the use of torture, which is a crime under both domestic and international law.  His only qualification to be Attorney General, for which he is manifestly unsuited, is that he was the first member of the Senate to endorse Donald Trump and has enthusiastically backed the worst of Trump’s policy proposals, some of which Sessions helped to craft.

Tom Price, who has yet to be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, is blatantly corrupt.  He and his wife, a member of the Georgia legislature, have invested in or received campaign contributions from a variety of medical and pharmaceutical companies, whose stock valuations were boosted by legislation that Price, as a member of Congress, introduced or supported.  Even while his nomination hearings were underway, his wife continued to take campaign contributions from those companies, an act of shameless self-interest that beggars the imagination.

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to become the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a climate change denier, who, as Attorney General of Oklahoma, has taken every opportunity to sue the EPA and oppose even the most modest of its fossil fuel regulations.  That’s because Pruitt is in the pocket of Charles and David Koch, and for much of his career, has shown himself to be their faithful servant.  If he has his way, he will gut the agency he has been nominated to lead.

Trump’s nominee to become the next Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, is  a former Goldman Sachs banker and a predatory investor who made millions by ruthlessly foreclosing on homeowners in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.  After scooping up a failed California-based bank for pennies on the dollar in a federal auction, Mnuchin exploited a variety of government guarantees and subsidies to put that bank back on its feet.  Then, he began to turn the screws, extracting profit from the bank’s mortgage portfolio by skirting lending regulations, lying to thousands of borrowers, and falsifying documents.  Add to that his failure to disclose $100 million in personal assets in the paperwork he was required to submit before his nomination could be considered.  Having promised to “drain the swamp,” it now appears that Donald Trump wants to install the Creature from the Black Lagoon as our next Secretary of the Treasury.

In short, we have a man in the White House who deserves to be impeached and an executive branch of government in the making that deserves nothing but repudiation.  Yet all but a handful of Republicans say and do nothing.

In 1957, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while still the junior Senator from Massachusetts,  wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called Profiles in Courage.  It told the stories of eight senators in the long history of our republic, several of them Republicans, who defied public opinion and political pressure to stand up for the causes or principles they believed in.  If today’s Republican senators do not soon do the same, JFK’s book will deserve a sequel:  Profiles in Cowardice.  Who will write it?  When will it be written?