gracchusdixit

On an April day in 1653, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth and the man who led a Puritan rebellion culminating in the execution of King Charles I, rose to address the so-called “Rump Parliament”.  Cromwell was furious, frustrated that its members had been unable to agree upon a new constitution. Before summoning his soldiers to eject these recalcitrant or reluctant politicians from the House of Commons, Cromwell roared:  “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately.  Depart, I say; and let us have done with you.  In the name of God, go!”

It is high time that someone said as much to Joe Biden—albeit with a bit more courtesy.

Biden is an immensely likable man, who, over the course of a long political career, has served our country well, having spent many years in the Senate and as Barack Obama’s vice president.  For all this, he deserves our respect and our gratitude.

This does not mean, however, that he deserves to become the next presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.  On the contrary, if Biden adds his name to an already long list of Democratic contenders and goes on to win the nomination, it is all but certain that Donald Trump will be reelected.  

Many of Biden’s supporters point to dozens of polls that put him at the top of the list of prospective Democratic nominees.  These polls count for nothing, because Biden’s lead is an artifact of his widespread familiarity.  As the 2020 election grows nearer, as other candidates become more familiar, Biden’s lead will diminish, if not disappear entirely.  I say this with more than the usual degree of certainty, because, as likable and seasoned as Joe Biden undoubtedly is,  he is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Our country has been longing for a new direction and fundamental change ever since Barack Obama came out of nowhere to win the White House in 2008.  That Obama failed to bring about such change—or was prevented from doing so—was one reason Donald Trump was able to take his place eight years later.  There is nothing in Joe Biden’s political record to suggest that he can satisfy this unfulfilled longing or that he even wants to.  Whatever else he may be, whatever else he may offer, he cannot give the country a new, invigorating vision of its future.  Like it or not, Joe Biden is yesterday’s news.

I do not say this, because Biden is chronologically “old”.  He would, of course, be 78 were he to take the oath of office, 82 at the end of his first term, and 86 at the end of his second.  But Bernie Sanders is a year older, Donald Trump is already a grotesque and flabby 73, and even the irrepressibly energetic Elizabeth Warren will be celebrating her 70th birthday in a couple of months.  

Chronological age is not the issue.  The issue is that Joe Biden is simply out of touch with the age in which we live.

Nothing illustrated this more dramatically than the tone-deaf way he dealt with recent complaints from a number of women that his physical contacts over the years have been overly and uncomfortably familiar.  These women did not accuse Joe Biden of sexual predation; they did not suggest that he did anything even remotely as revolting as the serial sexual misbehavior of Donald Trump.  They merely said that his actions were inappropriate and unprofessional, not only as viewed through the lens of “Me Too” but also at the time they occurred.  

Biden’s defenders can say all they want about his good heart, his affectionate nature, and his demonstrative manner.  The simple truth is, he should have known better.  And to put the matter to rest, all he had to do was to admit to that truth and apologize.  Instead, he sought to split hairs by expressing regret for giving offense but defending the innocence of his intentions.  This was the reflexive dodge of anyone caught in the crosshairs of unacceptable social behavior.  

Biden quickly made matters worse by cracking jokes about his behavior at a convention of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a trade union populated by aging and out-of-touch white men—so out of touch that they continue to call themselves a “brotherhood,” as if women weren’t capable of telling the difference between the two ends of a light switch.   These cultural dinosaurs guffawed at Biden’s jokes and gave him a round of applause, thereby embarrassing not only Biden but themselves.

This episode exposes the flawed logic underpinning Biden’s candidacy.  He presents himself as a man who can win over the middle of the country by addressing the anxieties of the white working class.  But he never stops to ask whether those anxieties merit addressing in the first place, particularly if the price to be paid is pandering to sexism, misogyny, and racial prejudice.  

All of which is compounded by the shameful role he played in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court 20 years ago.  Biden then presided over the committee that had it in its power to stop the Thomas nomination in its tracks.  Instead of challenging Clarence Thomas, Joe Biden chose to undermine the motives of his accuser, Anita Hill by, among other things, refusing to allow other victims of Thomas’ predations to testify and corroborate her story. 

Even if one were prepared to dismiss all this as cultural cluelessness rather than malign intent, which I for one am prepared to do, being tone-deaf is far from being Biden’s only problem.

Joe Biden spent more than 30 years in the Senate representing the State of Delaware, which is a notorious haven for corporate tax avoidance, described by some as a wholly-owned subsidiary of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, the giant chemical conglomerate that has dominated the political and economic life of the state since the days of the American Revolution.  Transparency International, a non-profit watchdog group, recently described Delaware as “a place where extreme corporate secrecy enables corrupt people, shady companies, drug traffickers, and fraudsters to cover their tracks”.   This is not to suggest that Joe Biden is himself corrupt, but the state he once represented most certainly is.   If he wins the Democratic nomination, this rock will be turned over, and nobody can predict what will come crawling out. 

Finally, there is Biden’s claim that he can work “across the aisle” and restore our government to a more benign era of bipartisan and collegial consensus.  This notion is worse than naive; it is a complete fantasy.  It would lead the Democratic Party and the nation as a whole down a blind alley, by ignoring the brutal reality of our politics and the moral depravity of Republicans who have chosen to embrace and defend a president whose actions threaten the very foundations of our democracy. 

No compromise can be made with such people.  The only course is to oppose and defeat them.  Judged by his own words and actions, Joe Biden is not the man for the job.  

In the name of God, Joe, go!

“Bugger” is a coarse but expressive expletive the British sometimes use to describe situations that are simultaneously calamitous and comedic.  No word I can think of is better suited to describe the political fiasco the world has come to know as “Brexit,” which, as every day goes by, calls into further question the sanity of a nation once famous for its stolid common sense.

The insanity began two years ago, when, in what can only be called a fit of delusional pique, a slim majority of the British public voted to withdraw from the European Union.  As shocking as this electoral tantrum was to many, it did not come as a complete surprise to anyone who was paying attention.

The British (or at least the English, which is quite a different thing) have been suspicious of “The Continent” for centuries.  Once upon a time, England and France fought a Hundred Years’ War over the arcane question of whose king was supposed to bend his knee to whom. In the early 19th century, the British went all out to frustrate Napoleon’s ambition to unite all of Europe.  And in the 20th century, of course, Britain was drawn into two world wars to fend off dangers emanating from “The Continent”.

Thus, not all Brits were fully on board when their government decided to join the European Union in 1973.  There were those, who thought they could detect a whiff of old Boney in the whole thing, another attempt by the slippery French to slip one over on the trusting English.  There were others, who saw membership in the EU as a final, humiliating adieu to the glory days of their global empire.  And finally, there was a gaggle of ever-craven politicians, who saw the EU as a bogeyman to be exploited for purely partisan purposes.

The false promises and shameless fear-mongering of these politicians proved to be quite simply breathtaking.  They preyed upon public prejudices against immigrants, especially brown and black immigrants, by claiming that the fundamental “Englishness” of the nation was at risk.  They promised that Britain’s financial contributions to the EU would be plowed straight back into the beloved National Health Service, vastly inflating the amount of money involved.  They insinuated that, once freed from the shackles of EU regulations, the UK could somehow return to the grand days of its Victorian empire.  All nonsense, all utter rubbish, all designed to distract British voters from the real social and economic problems their country faces.

The forces behind all this are far-flung, of course, and, as Americans know all too well, Britain is far from being the only nation capable of succumbing to self-destructive political impulses.  Nevertheless, Brexit was, from the start, a characteristically British farce—and, in particular, an unintended consequence of Britain’s perverse and, to anyone not born into it, incomprehensibly peculiar class system.  

The idea of putting the question of EU membership to a popular vote was the brainstorm of the previous Tory prime minister, David Cameron.  Schooled at Eton and Oxford, Cameron is a quintessential member of the upper-class elite.  From his perch atop the social pyramid, he condescendingly assumed that ordinary working-class Brits would listen to their betters by rejecting Brexit as obvious folly.  His ploy turned out to be, as the Brits say, too clever by half, because the “lower classes” weren’t prepared to be condescended to.

They were, however, prepared to be hoodwinked.  All the while la-de-da David Cameron was trying to pull them in one direction, other la-de-da Tories were pushing them in another.  The pusher-in-chief, another product of Eton and Oxford, is a man with the name (you can’t make this up) Jacob Rees-Mogg and a mother whose middle name is Shakespeare.  Only in the airless atmosphere of the British upper class would such pomposity be greeted with anything other than sniggering derision.

As if such pretensions weren’t risible enough, Rees-Mogg and his fellow Brexiteers seem to believe that the clock can be turned back a couple of hundred years to a time when British buccaneers roamed the high seas in search of glory and plunder, if only they can become, once again, the “island people” they once were.  Not for nothing has Rees-Mogg been nicknamed “the Honourable Member for the 18th Century,” though it has never been entirely clear whether that sobriquet is intended as praise or parody.

There may be a charming dollop of Gilbert & Sullivan in the eccentricities of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, but there is nothing at all charming about Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who has done more than anyone to stoke the fires of Brexit.  Murdoch is an Australian by birth, but he dominates the media landscape of the United Kingdom, controlling both the Times of London and The Sun, which are the quasi-official voices of, respectively,  the ruling class and the working class.

The United Kingdom has a long history of foreigners using media ownership to buy their way into the upper echelons of the British society.  The Canadian-born newspaper baron, Max Aitken, for example, became one of Churchill’s greatest pals, was awarded the title “Lord Beaverbrook,” and thereby occupied a seat in the House of Lords.  

Rupert Murdoch chose a different path.  Although he graduated from Oxford, has hobnobbed with every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, and is acknowledged to be the most powerful unelected person in the land, Murdoch has, like his father before him, used his media empire to vilify the British aristocracy and the monarchy, in particular.   It is impossible to know how much of Murdoch’s animus results from calculated self-interest (attacking the swells reliably sells newspapers) or from snubs he may have received along the way.  Whatever the cause, it is abundantly clear that Murdoch’s vendetta against the EU is, on some level, a way of getting back at the British establishment.

The European Union, it must be said, has real and substantive problems.  Its governing institutions are a long way from being fully democratic; its economic policies are controlled by high-minded and penny-pinching Germans; and its regulatory bureaucracy is populated by sometimes heavy-handed French officials.  Some would call this congeries of qualities the worst of all possible worlds, and they would not be entirely wrong.

The EU’s critics are worse than wrong, however, in their refusal to acknowledge all the good that it has accomplished, not the least of which is bringing an unprecedented era of peace, prosperity, and shared purpose to a continent previously wracked by division, conflict, and war.  Not since the days of the Roman Empire have Europeans had been so able to experience and celebrate their common culture and civilization.

What’s more, those who claim that Britain surrendered its sovereignty by joining the EU and got nothing in return are simply lying.  If that were in fact the case, Brexit wouldn’t even be on the table.  And far from getting nothing, the UK got a sweetheart of a deal.   

Even though the UK never adopted the euro, “The City”—namely, the financial industry that dominates the British economy—was allowed to operate as the major exchange for trading the euro on the world’s currency markets.  This cemented London’s place as the epicenter of global finance and lined the pockets of its bankers.  The UK was also given a host of exemptions from EU rules, enabling it to trade at will with Commonwealth nations like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. 

None of this, alas, has been enough to assuage a large swath of the skeptical British public, satisfy the rowdy Tories who populate the back benches of Parliament, or stymie the upper-crust toffs who stirred up this storm in the first place.  Now, they, and the people they pretend to represent, are going to have to live with the calamitous consequences.

Bugger!

Donald Trump recently declared that one of the central themes of his 2020 reelection campaign will be an attack on progressive Democrats for threatening the American way of life with godless “socialism”.   Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, one of the latest Democrats to jump into the race, promptly played right into Trump’s hands by declining to give a direct answer to the question:  “Are you a capitalist?”  Hickenlooper was instantly raked over the proverbial coals, not only by the cable news host who asked him the question, but also by a keening Greek chorus of pundits and politicians, who professed horror at the very idea that any responsible person might have the slightest doubts about the reigning economic ideology.

This kerfuffle says all you need to know about our mindless public discourse, in which it is no longer possible to question the status quo.  It also reveals something about capitalism itself—which is less a successful economic system than an alluring but deceptive fairy tale.

The first chapter of this fairy tale was written in 1776, when Adam Smith, published his iconic book, The Wealth of Nations.  In its pages, he claimed that markets are moved by an “invisible hand,” spinning the straw of human greed, as if magically, into a cloth of gold for society as a whole.  

Modern-day conservatives treat Smith’s account with almost religious reverence, as if it were self-evidently true.  That is not at all the case.  Indeed, Adam Smith’s claims were based on no economic evidence whatsoever—for the simple reason that he was a political philosopher, not an economist.  In fact, there was no such thing at the time, because the social science we call “economics” had yet to be invented. 

Moreover, Smith’s fairy tale began to unravel almost immediately, as the nascent Industrial Revolution gathered momentum.  Its power looms, blast furnaces, and coal-fired steam engines upended the traditional economic relationships Smith had described by unleashing what we today call “automation”.  Those with enough “capital” to buy the machines made vast fortunes.  Millions who had once made a living with their skilled hands were condemned to soulless work in factories and mines.  This caused the most famous prime minister of the Victorian Age, Benjamin Disraeli, to lament the rise of:

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.  The rich and the poor.

So combustible a situation could not long be contained.  

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, their cri de coeur against the social and economic divide Disraeli had described, in which they famously declared:  “Workers of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chains.”  No sooner had those words been written than most of Europe erupted in riots and revolution.  The turmoil was so threatening to the governing classes that they moved ruthlessly to suppress it.    Capitalism was thereby rescued from sudden death—but only by the skin of its teeth.  

The reprieve didn’t last long, however, for the simple reason that industrial capitalism was riven by inherent contradictions.  As the mechanization of work boosted the production of goods, it also drove down the wages of those destined to buy those goods.  This caused prices to fall.  Falling prices led, in turn, to even more production, as the system tried—desperately—to prop up declining profits.  Soon, the market was flooded with more goods than people needed, wanted, or could afford to buy, and prices fell again.

Adam Smith’s beatific fairy tale of the “invisible hand” had never anticipated such an outcome—but Karl Marx had.  He was one of the first to see that capitalism was at bottom a Ponzi scheme, and as such, bound to produce bubbles that would inevitably burst.  Which is precisely what happened next.

In 1873, financial markets around the world collapsed, precipitating the first “Great Depression”.  Economic output and wages collapsed.  In the United States alone, 10 states declared bankruptcy, thousands of private businesses defaulted on more than $20 billion of debt, and nearly 100 railroads went belly-up.  This was nothing less than an epochal economic catastrophe.  Its effects lasted for a generation and came very close, for a second time, to writing the final chapter of the capitalist fairy tale.  

Once again, however, and just in the knick of time, capitalism was rescued from extinction by political events.  As the 19th century drew to a close, the competing British, German, Austrian, and Russian Empires converged on a single purpose:  a rush to see who could out-gun whom.  Feverish nationalism ignited a mindless arms race, which ultimately led to the carnage of the First World War.  Perversely, it also saved capitalism.  Without vast infusions of public money, without the nationalization of economic activity demanded by “total war,” the depression that began in 1873 would never have ended.

It didn’t take long for this pattern to rear its ugly head again.  After Europe had exhausted itself on the battlefields of the First World War, the United States became the epicenter of the global financial system, and the “Roaring 20s” kicked in.   On October 24, 1929, the euphoria came to an abrupt halt, as the New York Stock Exchange began to tumble.  Within days, the market declined more than 25 percent; within a matter of months, it was down 50 percent; by the time the music stopped, the market had lost 90 percent of its value.  A second ‘Great Depression” gripped the world.  In the United States, thousands of banks closed their doors; entire industries all but shut down; and millions of Americans lost their jobs and their livelihoods, their homes and their hopes.

The administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt strove to mitigate the worst effects of the collapse by pumping vast amounts of public money into the economy.  But even these audacious measures weren’t enough.   It took another world war to save capitalism from utter extinction by, in effect, replacing it. 

To fight the Second World War, the economies of the United States and the United Kingdom were, for all intents and purposes, “nationalized‘.   Industrial production, wages, the prices and supply of consumer goods—all were “centrally planned”.  The fact that “central planning” actually worked, and eventually won the war, merely deepened the rancor of those who still believed in Adam Smith’s fairy tale.  Although few public figures dared to admit it at the time, laissez-faire capitalism had been quietly laid to rest.

After the war, it was taken for granted—and correctly so—that government intervention was required to insulate citizens against the catastrophic flaws of “the market”.  In Britain, a Labour government was elected in a landslide, creating, among other things, the National Health Service (which, next to the monarchy, remains to this day the most revered institution in Britain).   In the United States, the federal government introduced the GI Bill, created the Federal Housing Administration, and spent billions building the Interstate Highway System, the biggest public works project since the Roman Empire.  In the process, a new middle class came into being, and millions of Americans were finally able to realize opportunities that had once been unthinkable for all but a privileged few.

These accomplishments were so pervasive and so effective that they were eventually taken for granted and, half a century later, all but forgotten.  This forgetfulness allowed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to resurrect the failed ideology of laissez-faire capitalism under a new rubric, “neoliberalism,” and to demonize everything that true liberalism had accomplished.  

But they did far worse than that.  They and a small cadre of conservative intellectuals—Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others—asserted for the first time that political freedom was synonymous with the free market, that human rights were inseparable from property rights. These deeply immoral ideas—which Adam Smith would have rejected as preposterous—have become the political and economic catechism of the world’s governing class.  From Washington to Brussels, from Davos to Aspen, “neoliberalism” now reigns supreme.  Despite the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the tech bubble in 2000, and the implosion of global financial markets in 2008, from which much of the industrialized world has yet to recover, the fairy tale lives on—not because it works, but rather, because it serves the interests of elites around the world, is sustained by endless infusions of tax dollars, and has been rationalized by decades of self-serving propaganda.  

Millions of people here and abroad are finally beginning to wake up to the fact that capitalism is not only a fairy tale but a fraud. Those who run the political and financial institutions underpinning this fraudulent system find themselves casting about for scapegoats to explain why their precious system is falling apart and why so many millions are turning to illiberal alternatives.  For some of the system’s defenders, the explanation is an irrational hatred of immigrants.  For others, it is a cultural divide between tech-savvy urbanites and the denizens of the agricultural or industrial hinterland.  For still others, the villain is the unprincipled demagoguery of would-be autocrats like Donald Trump.

There is a measure of truth in each of these explanations.  But they all miss the bigger point.

The bigger point is that capitalism is a fairy tale and its promises are a fiction.  Eventually, even the most credulous and wide-eyed children grow up and cease any longer to believe in fairy tales.

It has become a cliché to bemoan the polarization of our political life.  Stories abound of tense family dinners, angry exchanges between spouses at opposing ends of the political spectrum, and liberals who refuse to be in the same room with conservatives, or vice versa.  Whatever stock you place in such tales, one thing is certain:  the polarization of our political discourse is not even remotely bipartisan.

For all their flaws, liberals have a long history of tolerating opposing opinions, no matter how vehemently they may disagree with those who hold them.  It was the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire—a quintessential liberal, if ever there was one—who is purported to have proclaimed:  “I wholly disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”  

Whether Voltaire actually uttered those words is neither here nor there.  What matters is that anyone who claims to be a liberal is obliged to defend the right of others to believe what they will and must, to an equal degree, be willing to listen to what they have to say.  The foundational qualities of liberalism, which are reason and tolerance, require that all sides of an argument must be given a fair hearing.

Unfortunately, those on the political right do not share these qualities.  Indeed, they disdain them, preferring to defame opposing arguments with vehemence and venom.  That is because, to conservatives, liberals are not only mistaken but morally wrong, and, worse than wrong, evil.  

There is no liberal or Democratic equivalent of this sort of zealotry.  

There is no liberal equivalent in our history of McCarthyism.  There is no Democratic equivalent of the 20-year-long plot by right-wing ideologues to hound and humiliate Bill and Hillary Clinton.  There is no equivalent on the left of the falsehoods cooked up by conservative conspiracy-mongers to impugn the birth and citizenship of Barack Obama.  No matter what Donald Trump and his surrogates may say about “presidential harassment,” the extreme polarization of our public and political life is in no meaningful sense bipartisan.  It is decidedly one-sided, and it emanates from the right.

The roots of the right-wing extremism that is tearing our country apart go back a long way, to the very founding of our nation, and those roots are deeply connected to religion.  According to our national myth, the Puritans, who made their famously hazardous journey across the Atlantic on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, came to these shores seeking religious freedom, striving to worship God in their own way,  untrammeled by an oppressive king and an established church.

The truth is more complicated.

Only a third of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower were Protestant dissenters, who fled England for religious reasons.  The rest were at best religiously indifferent:  laborers, servants, and farm-hands, destined for voluntary or indentured service, not in what became Puritan Massachusetts, but in decidedly non-dissenting Virginia.  

More to the point, the 30 or so actual Puritans on the leaky and lumbering Mayflower were not solely interested in freeing themselves from religious persecution; they wanted the freedom to impose their own theology on everyone else.  They fled England to escape a civil society that refused to let them have their way.  The Puritans, in fact, were bigots and religious zealots, and the zealotry they bequeathed to us has poisoned our politics from the day they set foot on Cape Cod.

Indeed, the word “Puritan” says it all.  Central to their beliefs was the millenarian fantasy that the end of the world was just around the corner, and, when the Day of Judgement arrived, only the morally “pure” would survive.  Thus, their world was starkly divided between between good and evil, between the pure and the impure, between those destined for salvation and those doomed to damnation, i.e., the rest of us.

This kind of thinking did not stop with the Puritans, not is it limited to their evangelical heirs and descendants.  The  intellectual founder of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley, was a die-hard Roman Catholic, who abominated the secularism of the academy, bewailed the ecumenism of Pope John XXIII, and cast the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union as an existential moral struggle.  To Buckley, being a communist or even a socialist was not only treasonous but sinful.

When Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” adopting the language of eschatological theology to describe a geopolitical rivalry, he was treading in Buckley’s footsteps.  When George W. Bush cooked up the phrase, “axis of evil,” to demonize Russia, North Korea, and Iran, he was doing the same.  

That right-wing ideologues have fastened on Iran as their particular bête noire is deeply ironic, because Iran’s religious leaders are no less fanatical.  All the while our present-day Puritans decry the Iranians as “evil,” Iran’s Puritans call us “the great Satan”.  

The problem is that such nonsensical talk does little to clarify or resolve the actual issues that divide our two countries, which are diplomatic, political, and economic, rather than moral, let alone theological.   

There is yet another aspect of right-wing fanaticism in the United States that derives directly from the toxic religiosity of the Puritans—the idea of perpetual victimhood.  For decades, Republicans have reveled in the notion that they are a beleaguered minority, even when they have controlled all three branches of government.   Fundamentalists wail against attacks on their religious freedom, even as they enjoy unrivaled privileges and protections.  Conservatives in general would have us believe that they are the helpless and innocent victims of an insidious and overpowering liberal plot, fomented by left-wing academics and journalists, even as they and their immensely rich backers expand their control over the levers of power. 

This self-serving trope mirrors the story that lies at the heart of Christianity itself—a story that exalts persecution, torture, and death over life, reason, and compromise; a myth that equates victimhood with virtue; a dangerous delusion that casts every political argument as a winner-take-all struggle between “good and evil,” between victims and their oppressors, rather than a simple disagreement between equal citizens, who have different views about the future.

If we ever hope to restore reason and compromise to our public discourse, then we must be prepared to cast aside such fairy tales and to reject the forces of unreason.  Chief among those forces is the unrelenting religiosity of those on the political right. 

There was very little in Donald Trump’s State of the Union harangue that added anything new to his usual stew of self-aggrandizing exaggerations, half truths, and outright lies.  One, brief sentence, however, deserves more attention than it has received.  It was:  “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”  In this at least, Trump was indubitably right.  

There is, alas, no indication that Trump believes his own words or is prepared to act upon them.  Apart from a hasty and half-baked decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, he has done nothing but sanctify and squander more money on our nation’s already bloated war machine.

The global military presence of the United States of America is greater than that of any nation in history.  We have more than 800 military bases around the world and deploy 450,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators in 150 countries.  Our military spending is equal to that of the next seven nations in the world combined.  We spend three times more than the Chinese, nine times more the Russians, and twelve times more than the French, whose military spending is the largest in Europe.  American armed forces are actively engaged in more than a dozen conflicts, none of which has ever been authorized by a declaration of war, as stipulated in the Constitution, let alone justified by an imminent or an even remotely credible threat.  The cost of all this consumes the lion’s share of the federal operating budget and strangles our ability to fund even the most basic domestic needs:  public education, our crumbling infrastructure, healthcare…the list goes on and on.

Those who defend this ghoulish militarization of our national priorities often speak of a Pax Americana, a phrase borrowed from the British, who were fond of calling their empire a Pax Britannica.  The British, in turn, borrowed the term from the ancient Romans, who created a true peace, the Pax Romana, which stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to the banks of the Euphrates, from the cold, craggy hills of Scotland to the shifting sands of the Sahara.  For centuries, the Pax Romana brought order to an otherwise chaotic and violent world.  Roman cities had aqueducts and baths, libraries and theaters, hippodromes and arenas, but they had no walls—because the invincible Roman legions stood guard on the distant frontiers of the empire. 

All empires rationalize their predatory behavior and profit-making by invoking some higher purpose.  The French told themselves that they were bringing civilization to the benighted people of Africa and Indochina, all the while they stole their minerals, their raw materials, and their freedom.  The British idealized their global empire with talk of the “white man’s burden,” as they systematically looted countries and cultures thousands of years older than their own.  And now, our foreign policy establishment, cheered on by the national media, seeks to justify the pursuit of American self-interest—and to excuse American hubris—by comparing our global military hegemony with the Pax Romana.

There is no comparison between the two that is even remotely plausible.

A British chieftain, who led an unsuccessful rebellion against Roman rule, famously said:  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem apellant.  “Where the Romans make a wasteland, they call it peace.”  It was a Roman historian, skeptical of his nation’s imperial entanglements, who recorded—or more likely, invented—those words. The irony is that those words were fundamentally untrue.

For all their flaws and failings, for all their cruelties and brutality, the Romans did not create a “wasteland”.  On the contrary, they created a civilization that lasted more than a thousand years.  They built roads and bridges and aqueducts; they founded cities by the hundreds; they brought a common language and a common culture to the Mediterranean world; they grounded their empire, not simply on the caprice of its rulers, but on the rule of law.  The civilization they built was the first in human history to transcend the parochialisms of race and religion, tribe and nation.  Its allure was so compelling that millions longed to say:  Civus Romanus sum.  “I am a Roman citizen”.   

Next to such achievements, what does the so-called Pax Americana add up to?

We call our country an “exceptional,” even an “indispensable,” nation, without pausing to wonder whether the rest of the world bothers to agree.  We talk endlessly of our commitment to democratic values, without questioning why we have so often toppled democratic governments and propped up tyrants, dictators, and anti-democrat regimes.  We exalt a “rules-based” global order, without asking who made those rules, who profits from them, and whether they are even remotely just.  Most hubristically of all, we cast ourselves, in the words of Ronald Reagan, as “a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere”.  Only a Hollywood-actor-turned-politician could turn the words of the Sermon on the Mount into a cynical, empty, and shopworn cliché.  The man who famously said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” is also the man who infamously and secretly sold weapons to the Iranians, using the proceeds to fund an illegal war against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua.  This is the kind of “peace” we have all too often given the world.

When we eventually abandon our military bases, as we inevitably will; when we ultimately surrender our role as “the world’s last superpower,” as we inevitably must; what will remain of the Pax Americana?  The answer is:  next to nothing.

It was Rudyard Kipling, the de facto poet laureate of the British Empire, who foretold the end of that empire.  But he could have been speaking about our empire, when he wrote:

Far-called our navies melt away;

On dune and headlands sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

The accomplishments of the Pax Americana are not even remotely akin to those of the Pax Britannica, let alone the far greater Pax Romana. There will be little to remember of its legacy, nor will its passing be lamented.  In pretending otherwise, we deceive no one but ourselves.

One of the greatest conceits—and cons—in American history is the proposition that, if you are rich, you must be brilliant in all ways, not only in the art of making money, but in everything else.  Thus it is that rich Americans have so often imagined themselves to be uniquely qualified to run the country or solve its most intractable problems.  In just about every instance, these rich bunglers have failed to deliver.  

Look no further than the case of Donald J. Trump.  He promised to “make America great again” by bringing his business talents to bear on the business of running the nation.  He  promised to populate his government with “all the best people”.   He promised to “drain the swamp”.  And now, he presides over what may well be the most incompetent, ineffectual, and corrupt presidential administration in American history.

None of which appears to deter other self-regarding rich people from trying their hands in the same arena.  The former CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz (net worth:  $3.4 billion), intends to run for president in 2020 as an independent.  By way of justification, he cites the longing of a “centrist” majority of Americans for a candidate, who eschews partisanship and radical extremes.  

That such a longing exists is a dubious proposition at best, since most voters who call themselves independents are more consistently liberal or conservative than registered Democrats or Republicans.

In any event, what Schultz actually means by “radical” is any attempt to raise taxes on rich people like himself.  Without a lick of logic or convincing evidence, he asserts that such proposals are impractical, opposed by a majority of Americans, or just plain wrong.  

In all this, he is joined by Michael Bloomberg (net worth:  $47.5 billion), who has been toying with the idea of running for president longer than many Americans have been alive.  Bloomberg’s claim to political fame is a tour of duty as Mayor of New York City, during which he infamously tried to ban “super-sized” soft drinks.  Having failed to deprive New Yorkers of carbonated sugar, he has turned his attention to starving the rest of the country of more consequential things.

Regarding proposals by progressive Democrats to strengthen Social Security or expand health care, Bloomberg whined condescendingly:  “I’m getting a little tired of listening to people talking about pie in the sky things”.   Regarding a proposal by Senator Elizabeth Warren to impose a wealth tax on the superrich to pay for such “pie in the sky things,” he snarled:  “Well, number one, I think the Constitution lets you impose income taxes only.  So, it is probably unconstitutional.  Number two, I don’t know of any country that has done that. ”

Bloomberg may be richer than Croesus, but if he wants to become president, he should probably read the Constitution, Article I of which gives the federal government the right to impose any taxes it chooses.  When he says “I don’t know of any country” that has imposed a wealth tax, the only possible conclusion is that he is being deliberately coy and disingenuous.  Dozens of countries have wealth taxes, and a billionaire like Bloomberg must certainly know it.  He must also know that one of those countries is oh-so-rich Switzerland, where, it is fair to guess, Michael Bloomberg may have stashed away more than a little of his cash.

What blinkered plutocrats like Schultz and Bloomberg fail to realize, or dare not acknowledge, is that a growing majority of Americans—71 percent in a recent poll—are demanding fundamental changes to our economic system.  Large numbers, particularly among the young, say they prefer socialism over capitalism, a notion that would have been considered laughably implausible when I was growing up.  

This doesn’t mean, of course, that such people actually understand what “socialism” involves; indeed, they might well change their minds if they did.  What it does mean is that they are sick and tired of the current economic system, which they believe to be rigged in favor of the rich and the powerful and therefore fundamentally unjust.  In this, they are indisputably correct.

When Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in 1952, the richest one percent of the population earned 10 percent of the income and owned 29 percent of the wealth; today, their shares of both income and wealth are more than double those figures.  When good old “Ike” was sworn into office, the top marginal tax rate was 92 percent; thanks to Donald Trump’s tax bill, the top marginal rate is now 37 percent, the lowest since the 1920s.  In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected for the first time, the average CEO was paid 42 times the wages of the average employee; by 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, CEOs were paid 347 times the wages of their employees.  

All the while the richest Americans have grown ever richer, most Americans have seen their hopes evaporate and their prospects wither.  Since the election of Ronald Reagan, median income in the United States has increased less than one half of one percent per year, barely enough to keep up with inflation and not nearly enough to improve the standard of living for most American families.  For the bottom 10 percent, the picture is even bleaker.  Their incomes have actually declined.  The poorest Americans are poorer today than they were on the day Ronald Reagan took the oath of office.

We should never begrudge those, whose entrepreneurial talents, initiative, and hard work have earned them a just reward.  There is no justice, however, in an economic system that enables the richest 26 billionaires in the world to accumulate as much wealth as half the population of the planet.  It wasn’t the “free market” that produced this result.  It wasn’t the laws of “supply and demand”.  Nor was it talent, initiative, and hard work.  What spawned this grotesque inequality is a man-made system of rules, in which the rules are rigged by the rich, for the rich.

Billionaires like Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg would like us to believe that this is simply “how the world works”—as if economic inequality were an act of nature as inevitable and ineluctable as the rising and the setting of the sun.  

Economic inequality is not an act of nature.  It is not inevitable.  It results from decisions made by human beings, from the institutions we create, the laws we enact, and the rules we make.  The rules that have been made by the rich to enrich themselves can be unmade, or remade, by the rest of us.  That is the reality that billionaires like Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg are too blind to see.  Either that, or they hope to blind the rest of us.  

We must not let them.  We must not listen to them.  Above all else, we must not elect them.

The Strait of Messina, a two-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Sicily from Italy, is one of the most consequential bodies of water in human history.  Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean and sits almost precisely in its middle.  From time immemorial, this 10,000-square-mile triangle of jagged coastline and craggy mountain valleys has confronted mariners with a major roadblock.  Sailing their way from Europe to North Africa, or vice versa, they could spent weeks making the long voyage around this hulking island or take the short-cut through the Strait.  For Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans and Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, for the Royal Navy and the U.S. Sixth Fleet, controlling this narrow channel has always been a strategic priority of paramount importance.

The problem is that the currents in the Strait of Messina are treacherous, the winds are unpredictable, and the waves, constantly flecked with foam, often seem to run in all directions at once.  For thousands of years, this roiling body of water was more than a short-cut, it was often a death-trap.  

The ancient Greeks dramatized this peril, as they did with so many things, by creating a myth—a myth about two sea monsters named Scylla and Charybdis.  Scylla symbolized the rocky shoals on the Italian side of the strait; Charybdis signified the eddies and whirlpools on the Sicilian side.  During his long journey home after the Trojan War, the epic hero, Odysseus, was blown far off course and found himself confronting these twin monsters.  He could hew toward the ravenous jaws of Scylla, where some of his men would undoubtedly be gobbled up but his ship at least had a chance of surviving, or he could tack toward the vertiginous whirlpool of Charybdis, where everyone and everything might be lost.  Wily Odysseus, as he was nicknamed by the poet Homer, made a characteristically wily decision.  He chose Scylla—and survived. 

Three thousand years later, Donald J. Trump made a different choice in confronting the opposing dangers of his own Scylla and Charybdis.  In the process, he revealed himself to be, not only far less wily than the hero of Homer’s ancient epic, but a political dunce. 

Trump’s Scylla was the many-headed monster of right-wing media:  ranters and ravers like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, who make fortunes by stirring up Trump’s “base” and by taunting him endlessly to shut the southern border, stop the flow of immigrants, round up those already here, and deport them faster than you can say habeas corpus.  These inflammatory cretins insist that Trump’s campaign promise to build a “very, very great wall” isn’t just another empty and expedient slogan but a solemn and inviolable pledge.  If he were to break that pledge, they warn, the Trump presidency would come crashing down.  

It has never been clear that these caterwauling Cassandra’s have as much influence over the Trump electorate as they claim, but Trump seems to believe that they do.  Coward that he is, he therefore decided to shut down much of the federal government to evade their ire.

Having scurried away from his Scylla, Trump had no alternative but to rush toward his Charybdis, the newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Honorable Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi.  Foolishly, he imagined her to be the lesser of the two monsters, having convinced himself that he held all the cards, that border security would be “very bad politics for the Democrats,” and that Pelosi would “cave” in the end.  All of which makes clear that Donald Trump is not the sailor wily Odysseus was.  In tacking toward his Charybdis, Trump entirely misjudged the political winds as well as the currents of public opinion.  He steered his listing, leaking vessel straight to the edge of Nancy Pelosi’s whirlpool.

The first sign that Trump’s ship was taking on water came when he summoned Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, to a meeting in the White House, where he demanded money for his wall as the price of reopening the government.  By all accounts, Pelosi responded with her signature smile and an unequivocal “no”.  Unaccustomed to being challenged by anyone, let alone a woman, Trump threw a tantrum, abruptly rose, and stomped off in a huff.

In a matter of hours, Pelosi followed her demurral with a letter, postponing the annual State of the Union address until the government reopened and there would actually be a “union” to discuss.  Trump seems to have thought that this report to Congress is a presidential “right” rather than a constitutional obligation, nor did he realize that the invitation to deliver this report publicly, before a joint session of Congress and the whole nation, is a gift solely in the power of the Speaker of the House to give.  For several days, he huffed and puffed about going forward over Pelosi’s objections.  But all the huffing and puffing turned out to be, as it usually is with Donald Trump, mere bluster.  In the end, it was Trump who “caved,” acknowledging Pelosi’s “prerogative” to disinvite him.

Things then got even worse.  Trump sent his obsequious vice president and his overconfident son-in-law on a mission to “do a deal,” the aim of which was to peel away so-called “moderate” Democrats from states that voted for Trump.  It didn’t work.  

Not only did Democrats stick with Pelosi more tightly than barnacles on a hull, Republicans began to peel away from their own commander in chief.  The House of Representatives passed a series of bills to reopen the government, with overwhelmingly majorities that included scores of Republicans.  In the Senate, a bill advanced by the White House won fewer Republican votes than a parallel bill sponsored by Democrats.  Whatever parliamentary mojo Trump thought he possessed, had evaporated.

The last straw came when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came face to face with his own Scylla and Charybdis.   As Republican senators saw the polling grow worse by the day, as they were besieged by countless angry constituents, as they watched Trump thrash about with increasing desperation and disarray, they threw up their hands and turned their wrath against McConnell.  

Whatever else he may be, Mitch McConnell is a skillful navigator of political waters no less wily than the Odysseus of old.   Without so much as a blink or a wink, McConnell pulled the plug on Trump’s leaking boat. The melodrama of the Trump shutdown, the longest shutdown of the federal government in American history, came to a whimpering end.

To save face, Trump is claiming that this humiliation is just a temporary time-out and that he will, in the end, get his wall by one means or another.  No one believes this, perhaps not even Trump himself.   

Before this fiasco, Donald Trump’s presidency was already spiraling downward.  Now, he finds himself caught in the vortex of his own Charybdis.  He is the one who made this choice.  From this whirlpool,  there is no escape.

The stand-off between Donald Trump and Democrats in Congress over the partial shutdown of the federal government is not, as advertised by the White House and generally accepted by the national news media, a fight over the construction of what Trump likes to call a “great, great wall” on the southern border of the United States.  Nor is it a fight over whether Mexico will ever pay for such a wall, as Trump promised, preposterously, to the gullible rubes who attended his rallies.  

The stand-off between Trump and Congress is more consequential than all that.  It is a battle about what constitutes the truth—and, in particular, who gets to define the truth.

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election in large part by selling his credulous supporters an implausibly grim fairy tale about the state of the country.   According to that tale, the nation is in peril, our security undermined by a flood of dangerous and disease-ridden immigrants, our economic prosperity stolen by devious foreigners, and our national identity corrupted by cultural changes that are positively “un-American”.  The predicate of Trump’s call to “make America great again” is that America is no longer great, and, to restore its greatness, a great leader is required—a leader who will erase the errors of the past and punish those who committed them.

Two toxic strains of thought underpin this dystopian proposition.  One is racism.  The other is religion.

The racist strain asserts that America is fundamentally a “white country,” and that black, brown or Asian immigrants pose a threat, not only to our security, but to our national identity.  Some who make this assertion mask their prejudices with anodyne clichés like “assimilation”—which is little more than code for demanding that immigrants “behave like white people”.  Others, like Congressman Steve King of Iowa, are less circumspect.  King once proclaimed:  “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”  The implication being that the babies of black or brown people shouldn’t be allowed to be born in the first place.  You have to give people like King credit for at least one thing:  they don’t bother to hide their hate.

The second strain in Trump’s dystopian tale of national crisis and decline is religion, specifically evangelical Christianity.  From the day Trump entered the presidential race, the pundit class struggled to explain why evangelicals so enthusiastically embraced a candidate who so extravagantly violated their purported values.  What the pundits failed to realize was that evangelical support for Trump had, and continues to have, nothing whatever to do with “values”.  It has everything to do with power.  

The grim Trump fairy tale—which merely parrots the horror story evangelicals have been telling themselves for years—is that Christians are under attack by a godless federal government and by morally depraved liberals in the media, Hollywood, and popular culture, whose intent is to destroy religion and demean the religious.

The reality is that, far from being under attack, Christians and Christianity occupy a singularly privileged place in American society.  Their beliefs are protected, their churches and schools are tax-exempt, their pastors and priests are given deference they rarely deserve, and their prayers are given pride of place in the public square—all, despite the Constitution’s  separation of church and state.

For evangelical Christians, however, none of that is enough.  They want far more.  They want nothing less than the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the land—even if that means overturning the Constitution and trampling on the religious freedom of everyone else. 

It would be a mistake to imagine that Donald Trump’s exploitation of such fairy tales is a unique phenomenon.  On the contrary, lies are essential to the rise of all demagogues and dictators, just as the ability to define and control the truth is essential to the survival of their regimes.  Every demagogue ascends to power by climbing a ladder of lies.  Every dictator holds onto power by controlling the truth.  All demagogues and dictators thrive on chaos and fear, because only a confused and fearful people will surrender their liberties and turn to a “strongman” for protection and salvation.

Hitler rose to power in Germany by peddling one of the greatest lies in human history, convincing millions of Germans that they were members of an “Aryan master race,” whose humiliating defeat in the First World War was caused, not by their own arrogant and inept militarism, but rather, by the treasonous behavior of corrupt liberal politicians at home and the Jews who financed them.  Hitler promised to make Germany “great again” by purifying it of those influences.  After killing millions of innocent people, he took the coward’s way out, swallowing poison in his Berlin bunker, as the walls of defeat closed in.

Mussolini rose to power in Italy by promising to restore the national pride of his demoralized countrymen, after their own humiliation in the First World War.  Unlike the Germans, Italians harbored no fantasies about being a “master race,” but they did have a glorious past, which Mussolini exploited with shameless abandon.  He convinced his people that the mighty Roman Empire could be restored—and restored only by him.  When this ludicrous fantasy inevitably collapsed, Mussolini and his mistress were executed by Communist partisans, their bodies mutilated and left to hang upside down, suspended from meathooks, at a gas station on the outskirts of Milan.

It remains to be seen whether some such fate may someday await Donald Trump.    

Whatever his ultimate end, Trump’s survival depends utterly upon his ability to invent, distort, and control the truth.  Like every demagogue and dictator, he has cast a spell over his followers—a tense but fragile bargain with the devil, in which Trump lies, and his supporters surrender to his lies, setting aside their own reason and humanity.  This capitulation is the keystone of every tyrant and totalitarian regime.  It is the political equivalent of a self-induced trance, in which morality and human decency are suspended.  The trance will maintain its grip, until the lies are revealed for what they are, until reality and truth reassert themselves, until the spell is broken.

For Donald Trump, the New Year shows every prospect of bringing in, not the “cup o’ kindness” of the Robert Burns poem, but a cup of bitter gall.  Whether he realizes it or not, Trump’s worst nightmare began at noon today, as a Democratic majority took control of the House of Representatives, and the Honorable Nancy Pelosi became, for the second time, the Speaker of the House.  

This is one of the most consequential constitutional offices in the land, putting Pelosi third in the line of presidential succession.   If Trump were to be impeached or forced to resign,  and if Mike Pence were revealed to have been complicit in abetting his crimes, Nancy Pelosi would automatically become the 46th President of the United States.  

Just imagine what that would do to the feeble mental circuity, not only of Trump himself, but of Republicans at large, who have spent decades trying to cast Pelosi as the political equivalent of Satan.  

Though unlikely, such an outcome is not beyond the realm of possibility.  With the passing of every new day, the Trump presidency grows shakier, his behavior becomes more erratic, and evidence mounts that he has violated countless laws and the constitution.

It does not require impeachment, however, for Nancy Pelosi to make Donald Trump’s life miserable.  She is, to begin with, much shrewder and more intelligent than the man whose principal adversary she is about to become.  She is also infinitely better prepared.  

Unlike Donald Trump, Pelosi was born into a political family.  Her father was a Democratic congressman from Maryland.  Both he and her brother served as mayors of Baltimore, a city known for its bare-knuckle, take-no-prisoners brand of politics.  Thus, Nancy Pelosi grew up watching and learning from real, professional politicians—not blustering amateurs like Trump.  

And she put what she learned to good work.  

Nancy Pelosi has spent the better part of 50 years in politics, on the local, state, and national levels.  She has been a major figure in the Democrat Party for much of that time, and she has been remarkably successful.

Not only is she the first woman to have been elected Speaker of the House—an historic achievement by any measure—she is also one of the most effective Speakers, male or female, in the history of the institution.  It is universally acknowledged, even by her foes, that her political and legislative skills are on a par with legendary deal-makers and arm-twisters like Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill.  

The contrast between Nancy Pelosi and her predecessor, Paul Ryan, could not be more stark.  Ryan’s tenure as Speaker of the House was a catastrophe for Republicans, devoid of any significant legislative accomplishments, apart from a tax cut for the rich that has become almost universally reviled.  Thanks in large part to Ryan’s feckless incompetence, as well as his spineless subservience to Trump, Republicans suffered an historic defeat in the 2018 mid-term election.  Unlike Ryan, Pelosi knows how to count votes, maintain discipline in her caucus, and get results.  As one of her closest confidants recently observed, “Nancy never forgets.”  The people “Nancy never forgets” include both her friends and her enemies.  

One sign of Pelosi’s redoubtable shrewdness is the deal she struck with progressive Democrats, who ran on a promise to vote against her as the next Speaker.  To give those progressives cover, she offered to step aside in four years, opening the door for a possible replacement from their ranks.  

This offer, of course, cost Pelosi nothing.  In four years, she will be well into her 80s and will probably be happier spending time with her grandchildren than trying to arm-wrestle the ambitious wannabes in the Democratic party.  

In short, to achieve her ultimate ends, Nancy Pelosi knows how to play the “long game”.  Is it likely that an impulsive and reactive “day-trader” like Donald Trump, who flits from one phony crisis to another, like a bee randomly snatching pollen from petals, can hope to win such a game?  The only rational answer is:  no.

To make matters worse, the nightmare Trump is about to face does not end with Nancy Pelosi.  A cadre of relentless—and relentlessly competent—Democrats are about to take charge of key congressional committees that, for the last two years, have been headed by bumbling Trump lackeys, sycophants, and apologists.  These committees have the legal and constitutional power to compel the Trump administration to comply with their demands, and there is little doubt that their new chairs will use that power.

The former Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, a dim-witted right-wing ideologue who spent the last two years as Trump’s political bagman, is being replaced by Adam Schiff.  Schiff is a Harvard-trained lawyer and one-time federal prosecutor, known for his unrelenting pursuit of criminality and corruption.  As a prosecutor, Schiff was famous for getting convictions.  As the new Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he is about to turn his prosecutorial sights on Donald Trump.

The former Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, spent the last two years trying to convince the country that the FBI was behind a secret conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump and elect Hillary Clinton—and, for all I know, behind a conspiracy to assassinate JFK and fabricate the moon landing.   Goodlatte is being replaced by a congressman from New York named Jerry Nadler.  Like Adam Schiff, Nadler is an attorney.  But he has been in politics most of his adult life, having been elected to congress 12 times, in each case by overwhelming margins.  There is nothing, nothing at all, that Trump can do to intimidate or reward, corrupt or cajole Jerry Nadler.  

The former Republican Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, wasted years and millions of taxpayer dollars on the fictional Benghazi investigation, which accomplished exactly nothing except to embarrass Gowdy himself.  He is being replaced by Elijah Cummings, one of the longest-serving and most respected members of the House of Representatives.  Like Schiff and Nadler, Cummings is a lawyer—and a formidable one.  There is little doubt that Chairman Cummings will rip the scabs off the conflicts of interest and corruption that permeate the Trump administration.  

On some level at least, Donald Trump must know all this.  As ignorant and ill-formed, as crude and cowardly, as selfish and self-absorbed as he undoubtedly is, there is ample evidence that he has a feral instinct for survival.  Like a hunted animal, he must smell danger on the wind, hear the footsteps of his pursuers, and feel their hot breath beating down on the hackles of his neck.  Surely, Donald Trump knows that he will soon find himself trapped in the dark recesses of a deep cave, where his only options will be to snarl and snap or to whimper in surrender.

Happy New Year, Mr. President!  Enjoy the nightmare.  

Thanks to an avalanche of court filings issued this week, we now know beyond any shadow of doubt that the current President of the United States (”Individual 1,” as he is called in a number of those filings) is a traitorous crook.  It is no longer in dispute that Donald Trump lied to the American people during the campaign about his business dealings in Russia.  Even worse, he appears to have concealed an attempt to bribe Vladimir Putin by offering Putin a $50 million penthouse apartment in a hotel tower he hoped to build in Moscow.  Worst yet, it is now abundantly clear that he, his children, and his henchmen conspired with the Russians to manipulate the 2016 election, not merely for political reasons, but for personal profit.  

It is difficult to imagine a more tawdry or despicable act by a sitting President of the United States.  At any other time in our history, the current occupant of the White House would already be facing impeachment and the prospect of criminal prosecution.   Indeed, any other president would have been forced to resign long ago.

Not Donald Trump.

Thus far, Trump has succeeded in skirting the consequences of his crimes by peddling the fantasy that he is the victim of a baseless “witch hunt” perpetrated by “angry Democrats”.  The threads of this fairy tale fray and grow thinner by the day, but the fabric has yet to pull completely apart.  In this, Trump has been aided, not only by his compliant Republican bag men in the Congress, but also, and more surprisingly, by the mainstream press, which incessantly cautions us that Trump’s actions, however shocking, may still be perfectly “legal”.  

This is arrant nonsense.  There is nothing even remotely “legal” about bribes to foreign officials, hush-money pay-offs to mistresses and porn stars designed to influence the outcome of an election, or outright lies to the electorate.  That the panjandrums and purveyors of conventional wisdom continue to equivocate about the legality of such behavior begs a fundamental question:  Why have we become so passive in the face of what is inarguably the most conspicuously corrupt presidency in American history?

One answer is that a large dollop of Trump supporters are dumber than doornails, having time and again proved themselves stupid enough to ignore or defend his every outrage.   They voted for a man they took to be a brilliant billionaire.  What they got, instead, was a con man, whose actual IQ is lower than the body temperature of a garden snake.  To admit as much would require Trump supporters to confess their own credulity.  For the professional chattering class to call out that credulity would require the country to confront the rather uncomfortable reality that a fair-sized chunk of our fellow citizens are, in fact, dumber than wood.  When Hillary Clinton used the impolite and impolitic word “deplorable” to describe that chunk of the electorate, she was pilloried.  That doesn’t mean that she was wrong.

Whether the deplorable dupes who voted for Trump like it or not, their gullibility is now on full display.  Out-of-work miners in West Virginia were gullible enough to believe his promise to save the coal industry, but coal-fired energy generation is at an all-time low.  Unemployed auto workers in the rust-belt were gullible enough to swallow his preposterous pledge to repatriate manufacturing jobs that migrated to Mexico or China long ago, but General Motors just announced that it’s going to lay off thousands of workers.  Millions of Americans were gullible enough to put their faith in Trump’s nonsense, imagining, against all evidence to the contrary, that his promises would make a difference in their lives.  What they got in return was precisely nothing.

Unfortunately, those who willingly allowed themselves to be duped by Trump are not his only victims.  The sugar-high produced by his tax cuts is wearing off and, like all drug-induced binges, is well on its way to producing a painful hangover.  Economic growth is slowing, the wages of ordinary Americans are returning to stagnation, and the financial markets are tumbling.  Meanwhile, corporate and personal credit card debt are at all-time highs, and the real estate market is choking with a backlog of unsold homes.  Whether all this will produce a recession is anybody’s guess, but it certainly puts a lie to the ephemeral economic “boom” Trump promised to his dumber-than-wood believers.

Whether those believers ever come to their senses is beside the point.  The more important point is that the rest of us must resist the temptation to become numb to the unending awfulness of the Trump presidency.  Bludgeoned by the endless drumbeat of his sexual scandals, financial crimes, and flagrant violations of the law, that temptation is undoubtedly hard to resist.  It would be far easier to crawl under a psychological rock, to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to every outrage, to hope against hope that the storm will eventually blow over.  

It has therefore become the received wisdom of the Democratic Party and the media commentariat that the prudent way to navigate this storm is to tread lightly when it comes to investigating or impeaching Donald Trump and the criminals in his administration.  Concentrate on policy, the political strategists and pundits say; compromise with Trump, when the opportunity arises; focus on passing legislation that will give voters what they want when it comes to healthcare and jobs.  Do all that, the narrative goes, and all come right in the end.

The problem with such advice is that it is fundamentally immoral.  It requires Democrats and the nation as a whole to abandon principle and ignore the existential threat that Donald Trump poses to our democracy, all for the sake of pragmatism and political advantage.  

The time for this sort of logic-chopping and ethical compromise is long past.  Too much is at stake.  We must shake off our stupor.  We must recognize that nothing is more important to the future of our country than ridding ourselves of Donald Trump and everything he represents.  If we become numbed to his crimes, we will reveal ourselves to be dumber than his victims.