gracchusdixit

It was scarcely more than a week ago that Joe Biden rode to victory in the “Super Tuesday” primary elections that have all but sealed his nomination as the next Democratic candidate for president.  Although his progressive opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, has vowed to fight on, the odds are now tilted heavily against him, and it would take little less than a miracle for him to prevail.  After months of stumbling and fumbling, Biden’s comeback was propelled by sheer panic on the part of the Democratic Party establishment and rank-and-file voters that a “socialist from Vermont” could never defeat the moronic but canny thug who occupies the White House.  

The irony in this is richer than clotted cream and thicker than treacle, because here we are, just days later, facing an existential health and economic crisis.  And to combat that crisis, much of the country is embracing “socialism” without even knowing it.  

The House of Representatives has passed an emergency bill that provides paid sick leave, extends unemployment benefits, and guarantees free coronavirus testing for those who need it, which will soon be just about everyone in the country.  These are ”socialist” measures, one and all.

The airline industry has asked for $50 billion dollars in federal assistance to stave off collapse and possible bankruptcy.  This mirrors the de facto nationalization of the automobile industry that occurred after the 2008 crash—another “socialist” measure, if ever there was one.  

And this is just the beginning.  

Our country’s response to the global pandemic has been the slowest and least competent in the industrialized world, with the result that we have no accurate assessment of how many Americans are already infected.  The number is certainly larger, much larger, than the latest accounting, and, as testing begins in earnest, will grow explosively.  This will send further shockwaves through the already battered financial markets and the broader economy.  It is all but certain that a recession is now underway, one that will spread and grow deeper as even more of the economy shuts down to stave off the worst consequences of the pandemic.  It is likely that massive government intervention will be required to save, not only our economy, but the global economy, before it tumbles from recession into depression.

In sum, the economic system we have idolized since the days of Ronald Reagan is crumbling before eyes, and it has become all too apparent that the “invisible hand” of the market is utterly powerless in the face of an equally invisible but far more powerful biological catastrophe.  

Three days ago, the nation’s leading expert on epidemics, Dr. Anthony Fauci, testified before Congress.  When he was asked why the response of the United States to the global pandemic has been so woefully deficient, he said:

The system is not really geared to what we need right now.  That is a failing.  It is a failing.  Let’s admit it.  The idea of anybody getting it (i.e., coronavirus testing) easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for that.  Do I think we should be?  Yes.  But we are not.

Fauci was talking about for-profit, privately insured health care, a system that costs the United States vastly more than any other advanced country and provides some of the worst care in the industrialized world.  Let’s be clear, however.  That system is the direct result of free-market capitalism, in which health care, like every other social good, is nothing more than a commodity to be sold and exploited for self-interest and private profit.  Capitalism justifies itself by claiming that the hard work, virtuous behavior, and entrepreneurial energy of self-interested individuals will inevitably produce rewards, not only for those individuals but for society as a whole.  To quote Gordon Gekko, the infamous character in the movie Wall Street:  “Greed is good.”

The problem, of course, is that greed isn’t good.  Not only that, it is grotesquely inefficient and unjust.  Natural and biological calamities have no regard for hard work, purportedly virtuous behavior, or entrepreneurial energy.  They could care less.  They strike the rich and the poor, the privileged and the powerless.  They humble great nations and sweep away empires.  They topple princes and kings no less than carpenters and plumbers.  To think that free-market capitalism is capable of dealing with a calamity like the coronavirus is delusional.

The “other countries” Dr. Fauci referred to in his testimony before Congress disabused themselves of that delusion long ago.  That is why their health care systems are more effective and far less costly than ours.  That is why they are far ahead of us in combatting this pandemic.  And that is why Americans are in for a rude awakening.  If Italy, with a health care system that is by all metrics superior to ours, is already drowning, just imagine what is going to happen here when the full scope of this pandemic becomes clear. 

No one knows when or how all this will end.  What we do know, however, is that the smug and self-confident myths of market capitalism, which have dominated our public life since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, are coming apart.   Who are the “socialists” now?  When all this is over, the answer may be:  everyone.

As I watched the Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas several days ago, I suddenly realized how an ancient Roman must have felt, perched on the bleachers in the Colosseum and watching the grisly but nonetheless riveting spectacle of gladiators hacking one another to pieces.  The spectacle of the Democratic gladiatorial contest in Las Vegas was no less riveting.  After months of the candidates playing nice with one another, the blades were finally drawn, and blood was spilt.  The blade that drew the most blood was wielded by Senator Elizabeth Warren, and most of the body parts that lay strewn on the arena floor at the end of the night were those of billionaire-turned-man-who-wants-to-run-the-country Michael Bloomberg. 

For weeks now, the punditocracy has been advancing two rationales for the plausibility of Bloomberg’s candidacy.  The first is that his virtually limitless wealth can fundamentally change the race, enabling him to saturate the airwaves with slick advertising and deploy a “data-driven” political juggernaut run by highly-paid tech wizards.  The second is that voters will welcome him with open arms for finally providing a powerful but “moderate” alternative to progressive (and, according to the conventional wisdom of the chattering classes, unelectable) candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  

Joe Biden, of course, has predicated his entire campaign on being the “moderate” who was most “electable,” but his dismal performance in earlier debates and the first two primaries has undercut that proposition.  The other middle-of-the-road hopefuls latched upon by the pundits, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, have had their own brief moments in the sun.  However, no convincing case can be made that either of them has even the slightest chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

Enter the billionaire businessman from New York in his self-appointed and media-anointed role as the knight in shining armor who may yet save the Democratic Party from itself.  This vision of Bloomberg has always been a fanciful bubble, pumped up, much like stock market bubbles, by speculation, wishful thinking, and a stubborn disinclination to take the facts into account.  On the stage in Las Vegas, the bubble burst.

Bloomberg was exposed for being precisely what he is:  a smug, self-satisfied rich guy, utterly devoid of self-awareness or humility and yet absolutely convinced that he is entitled to become president, simply because he is used to getting what he wants.  Bloomberg’s presumption was challenged by every other candidate on the stage but most relentlessly—and effectively—by Warren, whose legal skills of withering cross-examination were on full display.  She forced Bloomberg to confront the most repugnant aspects of his personal, professional, and political behavior:  his history of dismissive misogyny, his use of non-disclosure agreements to suppress complaints about the hostile work environment in his company, the blatantly racist intent of the “stop and frisk” policing he championed when he was the mayor of New York City, and his cozy relationship with his pals on Wall Street.   Against none of these challenges was he able to offer a plausible defense.  

There were a number of moments when Bloomberg damned himself by unintentionally showing us his true colors.  The most notable came when one of the moderators asked him whether he deserved his $65 billion fortune.  It was one of the few questions he didn’t hesitate to answer.  Of course he deserved his fortune, Bloomberg huffed, because he has “worked hard” for his money.

A line-man who clambers up poles to string cable during a January blizzard “works hard”.  A logger who slogs through the sodden mud of an Oregon forest to fell trees taller than skyscrapers “works hard”.  A doctor or a nurse who hovers for back-breaking hours over a surgical table trying to save lives “works hard”.  A vulnerable immigrant, trapped in a  sweltering restaurant kitchen where he is paid less than the minimum wage, “works hard”.  Next to such people, Michael Bloomberg has never done did a hard day’s work in his life.

Nor is he the “self-made man” he pretends to be.  While it is true that he didn’t inherit a fortune from an indulgent father, as did Donald Trump, Bloomberg is no Horatio Alger.  He attended Johns Hopkins and went on from there to the Harvard Business School, after which he promptly went to work on Wall Street.  To pay for this elite education and the network of influential contacts it gave him, he never had to wait on tables or saddle himself with debt or beg for a scholarship.  There is no shame in any of this.  But we shouldn’t be asked to believe that Michael Bloomberg pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps.

It may be that Bloomberg will stage a comeback in the next Democratic debate or that a new avalanche of spending will enable him to blunt or skirt further criticism.  No amount of money, however, can re-inflate the Bloomberg bubble that burst in Last Vegas.  If he hopes to stay in the race, he will have to do more than pontificate about his work ethic, the sanctity of capitalism, or the now ludicrous proposition that he is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump.  After Elizabeth Warren succeeded in slicing him up with a rhetorical scalpel, who is foolish enough to believe that Michael Bloomberg would be capable of withstanding the meat ax Donald Trump will wield if they ever confront one another in a debate?

There are those in the media who have suggested that Warren’s attack on Michael Bloomberg was a “tactical” move designed to reinvigorate a flagging campaign.  For all I know, that may be the case.  But there is another explanation.  It may just be that Warren, along with the other candidates on the stage, was genuinely outraged by what Michael Bloomberg is trying to do.  And so should we all.  

Bloomberg is free to spend his money in whatever way he chooses.  That does not give him the right to purchase a presidential nomination or to buy his way into the White House.  What Bloomberg is doing is fundamentally anti-democratic, and a political party that calls itself Democratic must therefore disavow him completely. Whatever else you may think of Elizabeth Warren, she was incontestably right when she declared that the Democratic Party cannot hope to win back the White House if its only answer to the catastrophe of Donald Trump is to nominate another smug, self-absorbed billionaire, who cannot tell the difference between his own wealth and the welfare of the nation.

Now that Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary,  has pulled ahead of Joe Biden in national polling, and shows every sign of winning many of the biggest states that will vote on “Super Tuesday,” the internecine hysteria of the Democratic Party, which has been gathering steam for weeks, is likely to reach a boil.  It is no secret that the party’s establishment—the political power brokers and big-money donors who helped Hillary Clinton get the nomination in 2016—are scared to death by the Senator from Vermont.  Clinton herself has contributed to the fear-mongering by publicly criticizing Sanders for no plausible reason other than petty, personal pique.  More consequentially, the Democratic National Committee abruptly changed its rules to allow Michael Bloomberg to participate in the next round of primary debates, presumably because they think Bloomberg has enough money to counter Sanders’ unrivaled ability to raise vast sums from small donors.

The Democratic establishment is vexed by Sanders, because his agenda, like that of his progressive competitor, Elizabeth Warren, threatens to upset the status quo, leveling the economic and social playing field after decades in which the top one percent have grown rich at the expense of everyone else.  Nothing so exercises the political and economic elite as the prospect of surrendering even a drop of their power, prestige, or wealth, a dread that applies to rich and influential Democrats just as it does to Republicans.  God forbid that the pesky proles should be given an inch, because, before you know it, they’ll want to take a mile.

In seeking to stifle Sanders’s candidacy, establishment politicians and pundits make four arguments:  (1) Sanders refuses to say what his social programs will cost or how he intends to pay for them; (2) his plans are impractical and will fail to muster a majority in Congress; (3) if his plans were enacted, they would wreck the economy; (4) this is a capitalist country to its core, so Americans will never vote for a “socialist,” from Vermont or anywhere else. 

The first three prongs of this attack are tendentious nonsense.  Sanders has made no secret of how he would pay for his agenda:  he would raise taxes across the board but most particularly on the very rich.  Those who criticize his proposals for being “impractical” must first explain (to cite merely one example) in what way it is “practical” to support the continued existence of a private health care system that is simultaneously the most expensive in the world and one of the least effective.  Finally, the notion that Sanders’ policies would wreck the economy is worse than nonsense; it is a complete fabrication.  Between 1945 and 1960, this country experienced the most robust and broadly shared economic expansion in its history, all the while the top marginal tax rate exceeded 90 percent.  

Since the substantive attacks on Sanders are little more than diversions, we are left with the claim that a supposedly capitalist country like ours will never accept a “socialist” as its president.  This assertion would no doubt have been true during the Cold War, when I was growing up.   Whether it is true any longer is far less certain.  Younger Americans, particularly so-called “millennials,” display remarkably little fondness for our current economic system and a surprising willingness to consider radical alternatives.  Since neither the Democratic establishment nor Donald Trump pay much attention to such realities, it is certain that they will do their utmost to smear Bernie Sanders as a godless socialist, who can’t be trusted to preside over the “free market” economy we are all called upon to revere.  

This attack will come, not because it’s true, but, rather, because it’s so easy to make.  And that’s because “socialism” is a slippery concept, which can be construed to mean just about anything and is routinely misunderstood even by those who condemn it most fervently.  Unlike the ideologies of capitalism and communism—or, for that matter, the religious ideologies of Christianity and Islam—socialism lacks a defining doctrine, a definitive text, or an authoritative prophet.  There is no socialist equivalent of Adam Smith or Karl Marx, let alone Jesus or Mohammed.  In days gone by, when capitalists and communists quarreled over rival interpretations of their respective ideologies, they did so within the doctrinal confines established by their prophetic founders.  It would never have occurred to a fervent capitalist to consult Das Kapital any more than a communist would have opened the pages of The Wealth of Nations.  Capitalism and communism, just like Christianity and Islam, are “closed systems,” in which true-believers talk largely to themselves.

This is not at all the case with socialism.  Nearly a hundred years ago, the Dictionary of Socialism identified no fewer than forty, significantly different variations of socialist thought.  Those who charge that this expansive philosophy would lead to the boogeymen of “central planning, the “nationalization” of industry,” or the “abolition of private property” simply don’t know what they’re talking about.  Socialism can mean any of those things—or none of them.

The reality is that socialism is not a fixed economic, political, or philosophical system, with a definite set of prescriptions designed to cure what ails us.  Rather, it is a wide-ranging set of ideas underpinned by a single moral principle—the principle that economic, political, and social justice are one and the same.  Capitalists believe that human societies and governments must bend to the will of the market, as if the market were an all-powerful natural or divine phenomenon, as inexorable as a volcanic eruption or the “invisible hand” of God.  Socialists believe that markets, and the economy more broadly, are entirely human creations that should serve human needs and the societies to which all human beings belong.  In that sense, Bernie Sanders truly is a socialist.  And so, even if they don’t know it, are most Americans.

On a muggy Monday afternoon in September 1787, Benjamin Franklin emerged from the building in Philadelphia we now call Independence Hall.   After months of contentious deliberations, the newly created United States of America at last had a constitution.  A certain Mrs. Powell, who with a crowd of others had been waiting expectantly outside, came up to Franklin and asked:  “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?”  To which Franklin famously replied:  “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Benjamin Franklin and his fellow founders understood full well how fragile democracy could be, because they were steeped in the lessons of classical antiquity.  They knew that the world’s first democracy, that of ancient Athens, had collapsed under the weight of its own hubristic excess.  They were all too aware that the Roman Republic, having endured for five centuries, ultimately succumbed to class conflict, civil war, and dictatorship.  In crafting the constitution of our own republic, the founders strove as best they could to guard against such perils.  

That is what led them to create a complex system of “checks and balances,” designed to fend off tyrannies of all kinds, either from oppressive popular majorities or from demagogic autocrats.  Say what you will about the ethical flaws of this system (and they are many), it has worked for the better part of 200 years, never perfectly but well enough to spare us the calamities that brought down Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic.

Until now.

Just days ago, a servile Republican majority in the United States Senate voted, with only one of its members dissenting, to “acquit” Donald Trump of the charges for which he had been impeached, despite overwhelming and undisputed evidence that he is guilty of corruptly abusing his powers as president and is certain to do so in the future.  We now face the once unthinkable reality that an out-and-out criminal occupies the oval office, one of our two major political parties is complicit in covering up his crimes, and there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that our venerable system of  “checks and balances” has been able to do about it.

However depressing this is, it comes as no surprise.  We have known for months that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, the upper echelons of the Republican Party, and an overwhelming majority of Republican voters were “all in” for Trump, not only willing but zealously determined to stand by their man, without regard for the law, the constitution, or common decency.  As the leader of the tea party caucus in Congress declared to Trump just 72 hours ago, “we have your back”.

Those millions of Americans who are struggling to cope with this almost incomprehensible calamity have been offered three consoling narratives by a legion of pundits and prognosticators: 

(1) Our country has endured and survived far worse than Donald Trump—secession and the Civil War, two World Wars and the Great Depression, political assassinations and urban riots, Vietnam and 9/11;

(2) Come November, we still have a chance to defeat Trump at the polls, exact a price for his wrongdoing, and restore our careening ship of state to an even keel before it founders on the rocks and sinks;

(3) No matter what happens in November, history will record and condemn the misdeeds of Trump and his fellow criminals, forever tarnishing their public reputations and personal legacies, with the result that future generations will look back upon them with contempt and disdain.  

As comforting as these narratives may be, they are as convincing as the soothing bedtime stories parents tell their anxious children before turning out the light.  When the harsh light of morning returns, however, reality again rears its ugly head.

While it is true that our country has weathered many storms, we have never before been buffeted by a storm like this.  Richard Nixon may have been a paranoid crook, but next to Donald Trump, he now seems almost harmless.  No president in our history has displayed a complete disregard for custom, law, and the constitution.  Never has the oval office been occupied by a totally corrupt and amoral sociopath.  Nor have we ever witnessed the nearly complete capitulation of our governing institutions to the whims of such a monster.  There is no way of turning back this clock; there is no means of repairing the damage; there is no possibility of returning to “normal”.

It may be that a majority of Americans will vote in November to reject Donald Trump and all that he stands for.  It is by no means certain, however, that their votes will be counted.  Trump was “elected” in 2016 with the connivance of Vladimir Putin.  Republicans in the Senate have now declared that he can, with impunity, do the same in 2020.  In many Republican-controlled states across the country, voter suppression and intimidation are already underway.  When election day comes, it is all but certain that votes will be hacked and manipulated.  If Trump is defeated nonetheless, there will be no one to stop him from declaring a national emergency, nullifying the election, and retaining power in perpetuity.  

Against such an outcome, the verdict of history will provide scant consolation and no defense whatsoever.  Should Trump succeed in undoing our democracy, he and his minions will be the ones writing the history.  They will be the heroes of their own story, just as their foes will be the villains.  Churchill once gibed in the House of Commons that history would prove one of his opponents to be wrong “because I shall write that history”.  And so he did.  There is no reason to think that Donald Trump, with an ego more gargantuan and grotesque even than Churchill’s, will do any less.  Illiterate dunce that he is, Trump will of course need a ghost writer, but in an autocracy populated by sycophants, ghost writers will be queuing up to do the job pro bono.

The words of warning that Benjamin Franklin uttered to Ms. Powell more than 200 years ago are tolling now, more solemnly than ever.  Lest his words become the death knell of our republic, we should, before it is too late, heed another of his warnings:  “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.  As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”  That says all you know to know, not only about Donald Trump, but about those who support him.

Amidst the unrelenting tumult of Donald Trump’s presidency, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, tragedy and comedy.  In fact, it is by no means clear that Trump himself can discern the difference—or even cares.  This shouldn’t surprise us, since Trump’s one indisputable claim to fame is the line, “You’re fired!”, which he declaimed ad nauseam on The Apprentice, a now-defunct reality-tv show in which he pretended to be the brilliantly successful businessman that he manifestly is not.  After a couple of seasons near the top of the charts, The Apprentice, like everything in the ephemeral world of television, ran out of gas, and quickly faded into oblivion.  Even so, it was the closest thing Donald Trump has ever come to real success in his otherwise pathetic public and private life.  

Much of that life has been spent in a desperate attempt to emulate the financial success of his shrewd, ruthless, and crooked father.  This caused Trump-the-son to commit a series of reckless gambles, which led to one financial shambles after another, requiring humiliating bail-outs from the very father he was trying to impress.  Donald Trump’s whole life, in short, has been a fraud bordering on a farce, of which his calamitous presidency is merely the latest tragicomic episode.

It is therefore both fitting and ironic that Donald Trump should have chosen Alan Dershowitz to join the legal team defending him as he faces impeachment in the United States Senate.  Fitting, because Dershowitz is a genuinely talented criminal defense attorney, and his newest client has piled up enough crimes to need the best defense money can buy.  Ironic, because Alan Dershowitz is in some respects no less fraudulent and farcical than the buffoon he now represents.  

Dershowitz poses as an expert on constitutional law and wants us to believe that, in defending Donald Trump, he is upholding fundamental constitutional principles.  His curriculum vitae can still be found on the website of the Harvard Law School, where he taught for nearly 50 years.  The opening blurb cites “numerous law review articles and books about criminal and constitutional law”.   And yet, of the 30 or so books listed in the “bibliography” section, none is a work of serious scholarship, constitutional or otherwise.  Most are some species of popular non-fiction, and several actually are fiction.  Of the 54 articles listed, ten deal tangentially with some aspect of constitutional law, and merely two focus entirely on constitutional questions.  Neither of these appeared in a legal or academic journal.  Both appeared in the popular press. 

Let it be said that there is nothing wrong with any of this.  Alan Dershowitz is entitled to write whatever he wishes wherever he wishes.  What he is not entitled to do is to pretend to be something he is not, let alone lay false claim to an expertise he does not possess.  This, however, is precisely what Dershowitz has been doing for years.  

Whatever talent he may possess as a lawyer, there is no denying his talent for self-promotion.  Shortly after his retirement, for example, Dershowitz gave an interview to The Crimson, which has been Harvard’s student newspaper for almost 150 years.  It is impossible to read the text of that interview today without laughing out loud.  It is little more than a shameless and tedious paean of praise for Alan Dershowitz by Alan Dershowitz, wherein he reveals himself to be one of those people whose only real interest is himself.  In its pages, he boasts of his “straight-A” grades at Brooklyn College and the Yale Law School.  He asserts that he was the youngest person to become a tenured member of the Harvard Law School faculty.  He claims to have been the first person at Harvard to be openly and proudly Jewish (Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, both Jews, both Harvard alumni, both renowned Supreme Court Justices, apparently don’t count).  He lays claim to super-human powers of recollection:  “I remember every single student that I called on in my class.  I remember where they all sat”.  And he proclaims his preeminence as a teacher:  “At the end of the first year, I got the highest ranking of any teacher in terms of teaching.  I was 25, and I got the highest teacher ranking.  So, I was very pleased.”  

This Trump-like avalanche of self-glorification threatens to drown or sweep away everything in its path.  But not quite everything.  Many of Dershowitz’s students have expressed opinions of his abilities that differ from his own.  To quote but one:  “Horrid, a name dropper and cares for nothing except his own personal self-aggrandizement.  Rude to students except for those who nod their heads in constant agreement to whatever falls out of his mouth.”  This description should resonate with anyone who has had to suffer through one of Dershowitz’s interminable tirades on cable television, in which little of legal or constitutional substance is ever said.

No wonder, then, that the Trump legal defense team is making constitutional arguments that are as bogus and preposterous as the man who cooked them up.  These Dershowitz-inspired arguments contend:  (1) presidents cannot be impeached unless they commit statutory crimes; (2) neither abuse of power nor obstruction of Congress, which are stipulated in the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, appears on the statute books; therefore (3) Donald Trump cannot lawfully be impeached.

There are (at least ) two problems with these so-called “arguments”.  

The first is that no federal criminal code existed when the constitution was written.  It is therefore ludicrous to suggest that the founders were thinking of “statutory” crimes when they declared: “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”  The “crimes” the founders had in mind were actions that violate the public trust and threaten the constitution itself.  

The second problem is that Dershowitz’s “argument” completely ignores the historical and legal context in which the impeachment clause of the constitution was written.  Having prosecuted a successful rebellion against a tyrannical king, the founders were concerned to rein in abuses of executive power on every level.  For precisely that reason, they added to the impeachment clause the phrase, “other high crimes and misdemeanors,” which had a long history in English common law.  In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton defined the impeachment clause this way:  “The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”  If ever a public man has engaged in “misconduct,” has ever abused or violated the public trust, surely that man is Donald Trump.

For Alan Dershowitz and his cat’s paws on the Trump defense team to contend that abuses of presidential power are not impeachable offenses is ludicrous on its face.  It is also a deliberate, or ignorant, perversion of constitutional history.  

Just as Donald Trump is a reality-TV has-been whose latest (and, one may hope, last) role is pretending to be president, Alan Dershowitz is a legal has-been whose only remaining role is pretending to be a constitutional expert.  It is one of the supreme ironies of history that these two con men should have found one another at precisely this moment.  Surely, the gods are laughing.  

In 1775, Samuel Johnson, who authored the first and arguably the greatest dictionary of the English Language, proclaimed:  “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”  The object of Dr. Johnson’s ire wasn’t patriotism itself; it was Britain’s then prime minister, William Pitt, the first politician of the modern age to recognize and consciously manipulate the power of public opinion.  And yet, Pitt was no demagogue or tyrant.  He exploited the patriotic emotions of the populace, not to benefit himself, but to advance what he deemed to be the interests of his country.  That cannot be said for the nabobs of nationalism who have taken his place.  

From Donald Trump to Boris Johnson, from Marie Le Pen to Narendra Modi, from Vladimir Putin to Bibi Netanyahu, a new generation of political charlatans has risen to power throughout the world by conjuring fictional tales of national identity, by pitting their respective nations against all others, and by recasting citizenship in terms of race, religion, and language.  Anyone who questions or opposes them is condemned as an alien to be cast out, an enemy to be cast down, or subhuman garbage to be cast aside.

These demagogic frauds mask their corrupt purposes with sentimental sloganeering and incantations of national “greatness”.  That is because such things make their victims feel good without imposing the irksome requirement that they pause to think or question.  From Trump’s “Make America Great Again” to Modi’s “India Rising,” Le Pen’s “Au Nom du Peuple,” and Johnson’s “Take Back Control,” every self-aggrandizing and jingoistic cliché in the book is dredged up, even though they signify nothing of substance and even less of moral consequence.  They do, however, serve the purpose of dividing the world into opposing camps.

The nabobs of nationalism are obsessed with pitting insiders against outsiders, because that is how they stay in power.  Donald Trump proclaimed, “A country without borders is not a country at all.”  In this, he merely plagiarized the words of that earlier nabob of nationalism, Ronald Reagan:  “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”  Demagogues like Trump and Reagan stoke and feed upon the paranoid fear of national danger and decay, for without it, they could not survive.  They must cast the world as an existential struggle of “us” versus “them,” for without a demonic “other” to denounce, without evil invaders to defeat, without a national race or religion to defend and glorify, they would have no purpose whatsoever.

The rationale for all this—if you can call it that—is the absurd proposition that the geographical accident of birth should supersede all other moral, civic, or political obligations.  Not only is this absurd, it is based on the flimsiest of historical foundations.  In fact, the very idea of national identity is a more recent and artificial concoction than most people realize.  Modern nation building did not begin until the 19th century.  Until the revolution of 1789, France was less a nation than the personal property of its monarchs, and a hundred years later, half the population still didn’t speak French.  Germany and Italy didn’t come into being until 1871, and even now, more than a 100 years later, their nationhood is far from certain. The former citizens of East Germany have never reconciled themselves to the reunification that was forced upon them after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the ever-fissiparous nature of Italian politics has from the start called into question whether the country will be able to hang together as a single state.  

Even that epitome of patriotic feeling, the “sceptered isle” of England, is in large part a political fiction, concocted by the Tudors, whose founder usurped the throne by murdering the last legitimate Plantagenet king.  To cover up this crime and weld together a divided society, the Tudors launched a program of systematic propaganda.  In this, they were helped by no less than William Shakespeare, whose history plays, particularly his malicious depiction of Richard III, is straight out of the Tudor playbook.  Even Henry VIII’s break with the Church of Rome had less to do with religious freedom (let alone his infatuation with Ann Boleyn) than with a consolidation of power by pitting the English “nation” against the higher authority of the Pope.  From the amorous Henry to the insatiably ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte,  the modern nation-state and the patriotic fervor it demands have always been tools demagogues and tyrants use to advance their own corrupt interests.  

Nationalism is also an impediment to human progress, and never more so than now.  Even the most powerful nation-states find themselves increasingly helpless as they confront so-called “non-state actors,” who reject the proposition that nation-states are entitled to monopolize political power and are the sole repositories of the legitimate use of violence.  When American drones kill civilians or assassinate foreign leaders, it is called preemption or self-defense.  When IEDs kill American soldiers, it is called terrorism.  In a world where nationalism has become a naked tool of tyrants, such moral dichotomies collapse.

Even more importantly, the modern nation-state is proving itself to be utterly incapable of dealing with the disruptions caused by global capitalism and the existential crisis of climate change. A system that pits one nation against another, that exalts competition over collaboration, that sees the world as a zero-sum struggle in which “we” win only when “they” lose, is fated to doom humankind.

The toxicity of this system was captured in a remark made by Theresa May, the former Tory prime minister of the United Kingdom:  “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.  You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.” Left unchallenged, that narrow and cramped conception of citizenship, confined as it is to the borders of the modern nation-state, will destroy us all.  

A much wiser and more humane view was voiced, two thousand years ago, by the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius:  “Consider the connection of all things in the universe…We should not say ‘I am Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but rather ‘I am a Citizen of the Universe’.”

The Theresa Mays of the modern world, nabobs of nationalism one and all, are dead wrong, whereas the long-dead Emperor of the Roman world was right.  We are all citizens of the world and the universe of which that world is but a small part.  If we continue to insist otherwise, it won’t be long before we cease to exist.

On September 20, 2001, scarcely 10 days after the attack that caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to come crashing down in a cascade of rubble and toxic ash, George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to announce how the United States would respond.  Not since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had the nation suffered such an assault, not only on its citizens but on its sense of self.  

Toward the end of his speech, Bush asked:  “Why do they hate us?”  He was convinced that he knew the answer:

They hate our freedoms:  our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other…These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.  With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends.  They stand against us because we stand in their way.

Bush’s answer was self-congratulatory and conveniently comforting, assuring Americans that they stood on the side of right and that those who attacked them were ipso facto evil.  It was also a recantation, for the umpteenth time, of  a false and anesthetizing fairy tale that we’ve been telling ourselves since the end of the Second World War.  In that tale, we are the knights in shining armor who saved the world from the powers of darkness; we are the selfless champions of freedom, civilization, and human decency; we are the “exceptional and indispensable nation,” without which the world would sink into the abyss of tyranny or utter anarchy. 

As throngs of embittered and angry Iraqis stormed our embassy in Baghdad just days ago, Americans might be forgiven for asking themselves once again why, if we are the decent and benevolent nation in that tale, so many people around the world continue to hate us.  Certainly, they got no answer from our current president.  What they got, instead, was the assassination of one of Iran’s most senior military and political leaders on the still unsubstantiated pretext that he was planning an imminent attack on Americans somewhere in the world.  They also got threats of retributive armageddon if the Iranians don’t toe the line and henceforth do what the United States demands.  In the 20 years since the attack on the World Trade Center, our political leaders seem to have learned exactly nothing.

For three quarters of a century, the United States has been running nothing less than an empire, unprecedented in its reach and global impact, in which military power and money-making have become one and the same.  In the waning days of the Second World War, the president of General Motors, which was piling up record profits producing millions of tanks and trucks, planes and guns, urged the federal government to create a “permanent war economy” when the war itself was over.  He got what he wanted.  Today, we have more than 800 military, naval, and air bases around the world, and several hundred more here at home.  American troops are deployed in more than 150 countries. We spend more than half the federal budget on “defense,” and that doesn’t count the largely secret sums we spend on so-called “intelligence” agencies or on the Department of Homeland Security, which wouldn’t exist if we were content to stop interfering in the affairs of other nations.

Unlike earlier “colonial” empires, we do not rule by inhabiting, investing in, or trying to improve (however selfishly) the lands we dominate.  There are no American equivalents of the peerless roads, public baths, and awe-inducing civic monuments of the Roman Empire; there is no American version of the parliamentary and judicial institutions bequeathed by the British to their former colonies and dominions; there is not even the intangible but precious gift of language, which the nations once dominated by the French preserve to this day.  Our empire is wholly military in its manifestations and solely economic in its motivations.

Far from being a benevolent beacon of hope and freedom, the United States has, since the end of the Second World War, used violence to advance its economic interests more systematically than any other country in the world.  We have fomented 59 coups d’état or insurrections against foreign governments, many of them democratically elected. We have invaded more than a dozen countries for no reason other than the fact that we did not approve of the political choices their citizens had freely made.  Long before the Russians hacked our own 2016 presidential election, we manipulated dozens of elections in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.   We planned the assassination of 50 foreign political leaders who dared to oppose our interests and succeeded in murdering at least a dozen.  The drone attack that killed Qasem Soleimani on the tarmac in Baghdad was just the latest episode in this long and shameful history—a history that most Americans know little about and one that our government would like all of us to forget.

It is not my intention to defend a man like Qasem Soleimani, or to sanitize his actions.  He is responsible for thousands of deaths and deserves condemnation for every single one.  But so do the political and military leaders who have presided over the American empire for the last 75 years.  Soleimani’s crimes, if that is what they are, pale in comparison with the countless numbers who have been thwarted or threatened, killed or maimed, orphaned or displaced, to advance American interests.

Anyone who dares to question American imperialism is invariably accused of propagating a false moral equivalency between a fundamentally “good” country that must occasionally do bad things to protect itself and a country like Iran that is supposedly evil through and through.  

The true false equivalency, however, lies in asserting that our overt imposition of military power and our covert use of violence, intimidation, and murder is justified by the righteousness of our cause.  For all the self-congratulatory rhetoric, for all the euphoric talk about freedom, for all the sermonizing that the United States is a shining “city upon a hill,” Americans have yet to confront the blunt and brutal reality of what our country has actually become.  

We are not hated because of our freedoms of religion or speech or free assembly.  We are hated, because we demand the freedom to rob other human beings of theirs.  We are an empire, no less ruthless than the empires that came before us.  The only “exceptional” quality of our empire is its self-righteous hypocrisy.  Until we face up to that reality, we will never answer the question, “Why do they hate us?”  Until that day comes, their hatred will endure.  

From the day, three years ago, when Donald Trump lied, cheated, and stole his way into the White House, we have been told that his soon-to-be-impeached presidency is so abnormal that it constitutes a “new normal,” a sharp break, not only from the unspoken norms that once governed our public life, but also from the conservative principles that supposedly constitute the bedrock of the Republican Party.  A small band of “Never-Trump” Republicans, reduced to earning a living by talking to one another on cable news or venting their frustrations in the pages of the New York Times, assert, with the fervor which only the spurned can muster, that Trump doesn’t represent their party.  To explain the stubborn fact that so many other members of that party have prostrated themselves before the malicious manikin in the White House, they protest that Trump has bullied otherwise decent Republicans into submission, or, like the leader of some cult, has bewitched them.  If such explanations were true, they would be terrible enough.  But the truth is more terrible than that.  

As monstrous as Donald Trump undoubtedly is, he is no anomaly, nor is his presidency a “new normal,” as far as the Republican Party is concerned.  On the contrary, he epitomizes—indeed, he is the ultimate embodiment of—everything awful the Republican Party has represented for generations.  Trump’s personal and public corruption, his contempt for the law, his petty vindictiveness, his hatred of foreigners and immigrants, his vitriolic racism, and above all else, his willingness to intimidate, threaten, and demonize those who oppose him—all this has been part and parcel of Republican politics for as long as I have been alive.   Far from being “new,” the awfulness of the Trump presidency is an old and familiarly malevolent story.  The only thing new about it is Trump’s shameless candor.  In days gone by, his Republican predecessors were sufficiently concerned about public opinion to pretend to be something other than what they were; Trump doesn’t even bother—in all likelihood, because he doesn’t care.

It can fairly be said that the Republican Party of Donald Trump was born on the evening of February 9, 1950, when an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy rose to harangue a small gathering of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia.  McCarthy was an utterly unethical opportunist without an ounce of principle—and a belligerent drunk to boot.  But he was no fool.  He knew full well that his brief time in the Senate had produced nothing of consequence or distinction, and that he was going to need a “reset” if he was to have any hope of being reelected.   The speech in Wheeling gave him the chance he was looking for.

Brandishing a piece of mysterious and unidentified paper in his fist, McCarthy bellowed to the small audience at his feet that it contained the names of 205 “known communists,” who, he declared, had wormed their way into the highest reaches of government, including, most particularly, the Department of State, which, according to McCarthy, was infested with treasonous, un-American Ivy-League elitists.  The junior senator never revealed the actual contents of that piece of paper, because it was as phony as the stacks of file folders Donald Trump piled up three years ago when he still bothered to pretend that he had disentangled himself from his personal business interests.

None of that mattered at the time, however.  McCarthy’s speech in Wheeling was the opening salvo in what became a true witch hunt, in which he sought to persecute those he smeared as “enemies from within”—the political establishment, professional civil servants, graduates of the nation’s elite colleges and universities, anyone, in other words, who did not qualify as “true Americans,” as defined by Joe McCarthy himself.  The vast majority of these so-called “enemies” were innocent of any iota of wrongdoing, but McCarthy didn’t care.  To distract voters from his own failings, to protect himself against electoral defeat, he needed enemies to denounce.  And denounce he did.  

Joe McCarthy’s years-long campaign of innuendo and intimidation, accusation and vilification, ended countless careers, ruined hundreds of lives, and poisoned the public life of the country for a generation.  In all this, he was aided by a notoriously amoral and corrupt lawyer named Roy Cohn, who served as McCarthy’s chief counsel and went on, many years later, to become Donald Trump’s legal fixer in the murky, mob-infested world of New York City real estate.  To this day, Trump remains so enamored of Cohn that, when Jeff Sessions decided to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation, Trump’s first instinct was to howl in rage: “Where is my Roy Cohn?”

The road from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump runs dead straight, and it runs straight through the Republican Party.

Two years after McCarthy launched his witch hunt, Dwight David Eisenhower was elected president, the first Republican to occupy the office in 20 years.  As a national hero, revered for his former role as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, “Ike” had more than enough stature and political capital to put an end to McCarthy’s madness in a New York minute.  But he did nothing of the sort.  Instead, he dithered, dawdled, and delayed, until McCarthy finally crossed a line that even good old “Ike” couldn’t countenance.  When McCarthy finally turned his sights on Eisenhower’s beloved United States Army, “Ike” had no choice but to turn his back on the junior senator from Wisconsin.  McCarthy was censured, left the Senate in disgrace, and died.  But the poison he had injected into the bloodstream of the Republican Party lived on.

In 1960, Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, ran for president and was defeated by Jack Kennedy, a humiliation he never forgot and would never forgive.  Whatever else may be said of Richard Nixon, he knew how to hold a grudge.  In 1968, when he ran again, he did so by deploying the infamous “Southern Strategy,” a cynical but successful effort to inflame the racial prejudices of Southern whites.  But then, he went even further.  In the run-up to the election, he conspired with the government of South Vietnam to sabotage peace negotiations initiated by the sitting president, Lyndon Johnson.  When Johnson learned of Nixon’s chicanery, he privately judged it to be treasonous.  Even the leader of the Republican minority in the United States Senate, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, did not disagree.

Nixon’s misbehavior was an amateurish prelude to the sophisticated corruption of the Reagan administration.  Ronald Reagan is now lionized as a hero in right-wing circles, the personification of the values and virtues the Republican Party pretends to revere.  He was, in fact, a utter, albeit charming, fraud.  

Before getting into politics, Reagan made a fortune as the paid shill of the General Electric Company, traveling the nation to give speeches denouncing as “godless socialism” any bit of legislation that might nibble away at GE’s profits.  When he finally made it to the White House, Reagan’s corruption bloomed like the toxic red algae that now chokes the beaches of Florida every summer.  He authorized the notorious scheme now known as the “Iran-Contra Affair,” in which the U.S. government secretly sold arms to Iran, paid for by profits from the opium trade, which were used in turn to fund a covert (and illegal) guerrilla war against the democratically elected socialist government of Nicaragua.  Reagan’s Attorney General and long-time pal, Ed Meese, was forced to resign, when it was revealed that he had corruptly used his influence to toss lucrative government contracts to friends and political supporters.  

Two months ago, Donald awarded the “Presidential Medal of Freedom” to Ed Meese, now a doddering, sagging shell of a man, a barely recognizable simulacrum of the person he once was.  But like all Republicans then and now, he summoned up enough partisan bile to exploit the occasion by asserting his virtue and denying his undeniable guilt.  He praised Donald Trump and was praised, in turn, by Trump’s own obsequious Attorney General, William Barr.

There is, in short, nothing new about the “new normal,” and history is nothing if not ironic.   

The last of these commentaries concerned itself with the bigoted religiosity of the current Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, which causes him to distort history and misrepresent the Constitution for the purpose of imposing upon the nation what can only be called a medieval theology.  I have never before discussed the same subject on two consecutive occasions in these pages.  I must depart from that practice now, because it is abundantly clear that William Barr is quite prepared to break every rule and forsake every norm that once defined the foremost duty of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer—which is to administer justice dispassionately, without fear or favor, putting aside personal prejudice or political parti pris.  Not only has William Barr failed to honor this duty, he no longer bothers even to pretend.  

Ten days ago, Barr delivered a speech to the Federalist Society, a right-wing legal think tank that is responsible for picking the conservative judicial nominees with whom Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have packed the federal courts.  Barr’s speech was more than the predictably conservative screed one would expect from such a man speaking to such an audience.  It was a declaration of holy war—against liberals, against the legislative and judicial branches of government, against anyone who dares to challenge the actions or question the legitimacy of Donald J. Trump.   This shrill jeremiad made four assertions: 

(1)  The framers endowed the presidency with sweeping executive powers.  Not only is the presidency “one of the great and remarkable innovations in our Constitution,” it has “more than any other branch…fulfilled the expectations of the framers”.

(2) This “great and remarkable innovation” has been under “unscrupulous” attack for decades by the legislative and judicial branches of government, with the result that executive power has been weakened, “to the detriment of the nation”.

(3) Liberals and Democrats are engaged in “a scorched-earth, no holds-barred resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency, which Barr condemns as “dangerous” and “incendiary,” because it aims to “cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government”.  In Barr’s telling, “no other president has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda”.

(4)  The political left, not the conservative right, is responsible for “the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law”.  According to Barr, “conservatives tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means”.  This, he claims, “puts conservatives at a disadvantage when facing progressive holy war, especially when doing so under the weight of a hyper-partisan media”.  

If William Barr were an ignorant simpleton (as so many of Donald Trump’s spellbound and gawking followers undoubtedly are), these assertions could be dismissed as laughable absurdities.  Since he is neither ignorant nor simple, the only possible conclusion is that he is being deliberately dishonest.

In trying to justify his claim that the framers intended the presidency to have sweeping powers, Barr scrounges for arguments, like a partisan pig in search of truffles. One of his favorite truffles is the 17th century English philosopher John Locke, who, more than anyone, influenced the framers of the Constitution.  For all Barr’s scholarly pretensions, most of what he has to say about John Locke is not only wrong but laughably so. 

He contends, for example, that Locke was more fearful of a tyrannical parliament than of a tyrannical king.  Nothing could be more ridiculous.  Locke’s parents were Puritans.  His father fought on the side of parliament during the English Civil War, which ended with the beheading of the Stuart king, Charles I.   When another Stuart king was restored to the throne, Locke fled to Holland, where he published his most significant political works, because he did not dare to do so at home.  He returned to England only when the “Glorious Revolution” had expelled that king.  Barr’s attempt to turn John Locke into an advocate of unbridled executive power is nothing less than absurd.

Even more absurd is the fact that he all but ignores the words of the Constitution itself, perhaps because it says next to nothing to support his claims.  

Articles I and II of the Constitution establish and define the powers of the legislative and executive branches of government, respectively, and it is inescapably clear that they intend the legislative branch to be preeminent.

Article I runs to 2,367 words and spends 435 enumerating 19 specific powers that are solely the prerogatives of the legislative branch.  Article II, on the other hand, runs to a mere 1,068 words, most of which concern electoral process, limitations on presidential power, and potential reasons for impeachment.  It dedicates a mere 233 words—less than half a page—to the actual powers of the presidency, which, no matter what William Barr would like us to believe, are few and limited.  Nowhere does Article II mention “executive orders,” “executive privilege,” or “presidential immunity”.  Barr’s assertion that the “great and remarkable innovation” of the presidency was endowed by the framers with sweeping powers is the  figment of a febrile imagination.

Barr’s claim that the presidency has been systematically weakened by the legislative and judicial branches of government “to the detriment of the nation” is worse than febrile, it is preposterous.  Far from being weakened, the powers of the presidency have metastasized from the very day our republic was founded.  From Jefferson to Jackson, from Old Abe to TR, from Nixon to Reagan, from George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump, one greedy president after another has expanded the powers of his office—some would say “unconstitutionally,” others might even say “to the detriment of the nation”.

Barr condemns completely legitimate opposition to Donald Trump, because, in his view, it aims to “cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government”.  Note the slippery phrase, “duly elected government”.  The bitter truth William Barr does not admit, a truth that no Republican will ever admit, is that Donald Trump is not, in fact, the democratically elected President of the United States.  Not only did he lose the popular election by three million votes, his razor-thin win in the electoral college (itself an anti-democratic and antiquated institution) was the result of Russian interference.  The rhetorical charade that Donald Trump heads a “duly elected government” is a duplicitous distraction.

But then, duplicity appears to be William Barr’s specialty.  When he asserts, with a straight face, that “no other president has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda,” the only sane reaction is to laugh in his face.  

What exactly does he think Republicans tried to do to Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s New Deal during the depths of the Great Depression?  What were Ken Starr and his protégé Brett Kavanaugh doing when they wasted years and millions of taxpayer dollars “investigating” Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes?  What was Mitch McConnell up to when he declared that his sole objective was to make Barack Obama, who had been elected not only “duly” but “democratically,” a one-term president?  Far from being the victim of a uniquely villainous attempt to undermine his presidency, Donald Trump, whose personal corruption and criminality are on full display each and every day, has been given a free ride.

Finally, there is Barr’s jaw-dropping proposition that liberals are responsible for “undermining the rule of law” and that conservatives have “more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel the ends justify the means”.  One can only ask:  What planet does William Barr live on?  Has he ever attended a Trump rally?  Has he ever watched the political apparatchiks who spout pro-Trump propaganda on Fox News Channel?  Who, exactly, does he think he is kidding?  If he trying to kid himself, he deserves our pity.  If he is trying to kid us, he deserves our contempt.  

Whatever the truth may be, William Barr has discredited himself by dishonoring his office.  He is no longer qualified to serve as the Attorney General of the United States.  No less than the dishonest demagogue he serves, he deserves to be impeached.

In the year 1483, a Dominican friar named Tomás de Torquemada was appointed the “Grand Inquisitor” of the newly formed Kingdom of Spain.  For the next 15 years, Torquemada oversaw a reign of terror, in which Muslims, Jews, and non-conforming Christians were bullied, expelled, tortured, and not infrequently condemned to the fires of an auto-da-fé—a ritual of public humiliation and penance, culminating in execution and incineration.  Torquemada was a converso, the descendant of Jews who had converted to Christianity to avoid persecution or to prosper economically.  Like so many converts, his zeal outstripped that of those whose families had always been Christian.  Indeed, Torquemada’s obsessive determination to rid Spain of “heresy” became so extreme and led to such horrific consequences that even Pope Alexander VI, who was himself a Spaniard, felt compelled to rein him in.  Centuries later, in an act of supreme and ironic cosmic justice, Torquemada’s tomb was ransacked by brigands, whereupon his bones were burned to a cinder in their own auto-da-fé.

Today, five hundred years after Torquemada launched the horrors of the Inquisition, it would seem that we have another Tomás de Torquemada living in our midst.  His name is William Barr, and he is the Attorney General of the United States.

For months, the pundits who populate our national newspapers and television networks have been asking the question:  How could a respectable legal traditionalist like Barr allow himself to become the cat’s paw of a low-rent thug like Donald Trump?  What the punditocracy fails to realize is that the premise behind the question is false.   William Barr has never been a “respectable legal traditionalist”.  His laconic demeanor, his precious parsing of words, all his hemming and hawing when he appears in public, all of this is a masquerade designed to hide his true nature, a ruse that has thus far been quite successful.   

Which is why the chattering classes were so taken aback when, earlier this week, Barr pulled back the curtain and revealed his true self.  During a speech at the University of Notre Dame, he lashed out at what he proclaimed to be the evils of “militant secularism,” blaming non-believing “progressives” for virtually every ailment that afflicts modern society:

I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack.  On the one hand, we have seen the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square.  On the other hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism.

By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim.  Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground.  In 1965, the illegitimacy rate was eight percent. In 1992, when I was last Attorney General, it was 25 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. In many of our large urban areas, it is around 70 percent.  Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.  As you all know, over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses. That is more casualties in a year than we experienced during the entire Vietnam War.

I will not dwell on all the bitter results of the new secular age.  Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.  And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.

Just about the only sin Barr’s breathtaking diatribe didn’t lay at the feet of liberal secularism was climate change, presumably because he doesn’t believe in it.  Either that, or because he believes that the Book of Genesis gives human beings the right to pillage the earth to their heart’s content, as long as they abide by the dictates of his medieval theology.

That all this surprised the bien pensants who populate journalism, the upper echelons of government, and the legal profession merely indicates how shallow their knowledge of William Barr actually is.  It also illustrates how shrewdly Barr has managed to cordon off his personal agenda from his public persona.  

When William Barr stands in front of a public audience under the watchful eyes of the press, he adopts the manner of a conventional member of the legal establishment, with a  plenitude of solemn, sotto voce mumbling about the rule of law and respect for the constitution.  When he finds himself among his own, namely, other hard-right Catholic revanchists, he unfurls his true colors.  

That is what happened at Notre Dame.  What William Barr felt safe to say in the cloistered confines of a Catholic university, he would never have said in the open forum of a “secular” institution like Harvard or Berkeley or, for that matter, the United States House of Representatives.

Barr’s remarks at Notre Dame were so illogical, so contrary to fact, and so historically absurd, that it’s hard to know where to begin.  The most ludicrous of his polemical falsehoods was the opening salvo: “I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack.”  Far from being “under increasing attack,” religion in the United States is privileged and protected.  Despite the constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state, religious practice is given extravagant deference in our public life.  Sessions of Congress are opened with prayers by “chaplains”.  Presidents dutifully attend “national prayer breakfasts” and would be assailed if they did not.  Deceased presidents are commemorated at “the national cathedral,” as if the American head of state were also the head of an established church.  

Even worse, religious institutions are tax-exempt, for reasons that have never made an ounce of sense and are never questioned, let alone investigated.  Bible-thumping evangelicals like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed are paid millions of dollars, but the institutions that enrich them are never taxed.  Thanks to the radical views of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, bigoted business owners are now permitted to discriminate against their fellow citizens on the grounds of “religious freedom”.

In short, religion in America, far from being “under attack,” is “on the attack,” and bigots like William Barr are leading the charge.  

Even more absurd is Barr’s assertion of a cause-and-effect relationship between the “militant secularism” he so despises and the “social pathologies” he decries.  There are many reasons for the so-called “wreckage of the family,” for rising levels of depression, suicide, and opioid addiction.  None of these doleful phenomena, however, has anything to do with a secularist attack on religion.  Barr makes his assertion without citing one jot of evidence, because no such evidence exists.

William Barr did not stumble unwittingly into the corrupt quagmire of the Trump presidency.  He is not an innocent and honorable naïf, who finds himself entangled in a moral morass he did not foresee.  William Barr actively schemed to become Attorney General, knowing full well what kind of man Donald Trump is.  He did this to acquire power—and to use that power to impose his religious bigotry on the nation.

Like Tomás de Torquemada, Barr is a converso—his father converted from Judaism to Catholicism—and also like Torquemada, his zeal and bigotry go far beyond what most life-long Christians would consider either reasonable or decent.   His aim is to replace “moral relativism with a “moral absolutism” that demands the condemnation and punishment of all who do not subscribe to William Barr’s medieval moral code.  If he is left unchecked, he will become our Torquemada, and the Justice Department he controls will become our Inquisition.