The Wrong 80 Year Old

 Dolly Parton's death rather unexpectedly floored me. I was not a huge fan of her music, but enjoyed it. Rather I was a massive fan of Parton the human being. As many have noted, Parton was perhaps the last universally loved American. She was authentic and authentically kind. Her charity work is legendary and her sense of humor sublime. She was the best of us.

That obviously stands in rank contrast with the man who is trying to tear down the country in, as Krugman suggests, a rage against a people that have moved against him. Trump's depredations are increasing precisely because he can read the polls. His threat to tear down the Kennedy Center, because the Courts won't let him put his name on it is a prime example of his narcissistic rage in action.

This is also the "logic" of a domestic abuser: if he can't have you, no one can. He would destroy the country rather than let it pass into someone's hands. Trump's tidal wave of bullshit swept him back into the Oval Office, but he never had a plan or even really a motivation to actually improve people's lives. He never has. He ran for president to stay out of jail and millions of Americans were stupid enough to believe him over the legion of people who told them - straight out - who he was. 

There are two big, huge, massive differences between Hitler and Trump. The first, obviously, is age. Hitler's death was...sudden. Trump, however, is old and looking older every day. The second difference is that Hitler was popular. His early actions and even his actions in the first half of the war were designed to shield the German people from his worst policies. He pulled Germany out of an economic spiral - he did not start one. Right now, Trump is manifestly unpopular with the American people and becoming more so. He's lost the Iran war, which people didn't want him to fight in the first place. 

He's not Hitler, he's Mussolini but with a more powerful country at his feet. 

We are a lesser country and a lesser world with Dolly Parton gone. Her goodness and decency, her ability to laugh at herself, her grace and even her tackiness were all so wonderful and the world is dimmer without her around. Do better next time, Reaper.

Charles II

 King Charles II of England was known for his extravagant tastes. If you've seen Restoration Era furniture or plays, that comes from his aesthetic. His was the restoration of the House of Stuart. He also kept a stable of mistresses, and while he had no legitimate heirs (which led to his brother becoming King and the Glorious Revolution), he had numerous bastards via these mistresses.

Which brings me to our own king with gilded tastes. It is slowly seeping into the news about Trump's latest mistress, Natalie Harp. Jon Ossoff even referenced her in a speech, and he's been a pretty astute rhetorician when it comes to attacking Trump. There is also the rumor that Alina Habba will be the new press secretary, and there have been rumors about her and Trump as well.

Are Trump's serial infidelities "important"? They certainly are not the most important awful thing he's done - even in the past 48 hours. 

Still, just as I've been saying that "corruption" is the angle to go after Trump and Republicans, I think "character" is going to be the fundamental level for any Democrat running in 2028. Donald Trump's rancid immorality manifests across multiple levels. The infidelity is just one aspect of it. It is nevertheless an angle that demonstrates the omnivorous narcissism at the core of this man.

In the end, Charles died of high living and kidney disease. His brother was so manifestly unacceptably absolutist, that Parliament overthrew him and established the principle of Parliamentary supremacy.

Just saying.

Worse Than Watergate

 Richardson reminds us that Richard Nixon was not hounded from office by Democrats, but he resigned because Republicans in Congress placed the rule of law and the interests of the United States above party loyalty. 

Trump's scandals are worse than Watergate. On a daily basis. What is truly worse than Watergate, though, is Congressional Republican spinelessness.

It's The Corruption

 My summer work has been to add to a student reader in US History, as we have to condense readings for a new schedule. The last installment was on the 1920s. I wrote about Harding's scandals and the market crash, while reading Sorkin's book on 1929. There are echoes today.

Richardson runs through the revelations about Trump's money laundering and the way big banks sheltered Epstein. Capitol One suspended Trump's accounts because they reeked of money laundering (though they waited until he left office, because they know he's a vindictive prick). We have the president of the United States with MASSIVE money laundering, tax evasion and other financial crimes...and there is seemingly nothing we can do about it. 

Harding himself - like Grant - does not appear to have profited from his office. His Attorney General sold liquor licenses (under Prohibition you needed a special license) and pardons. He did not serve any prison time, of course, but he was put on trial. His Interior Secretary did go to jail for selling strategic oil reserves to a private oil company. His Veterans Bureau leader also pocketed millions in kickbacks and bribes. What distinguishes Trump is that he personally is getting rich off his office. That has never, ever happened in our 250 year history that we know of. 

In the aftermath of the crash of '29, Congress eventually got around to holding hearings - the Pecora Hearings - on the financial crimes and mismanagement that Wall Street committed in the bubble of '28-29. The thing is, they didn't find many crimes, because there were no laws against insider trading, tax evasion and market manipulation. Those hearings led to a few prosecutions, but I can't recall many convictions - similar to 2008 in the lack of convictions. Instead, it led to the New Deal financial reforms, like Glass-Steagall and the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Now, we have a (deeply unpopular) president who is at the nexus of a myriad of financial crimes and possibly a pedophile ring. He is building gilded monuments to himself with taxpayer money, while raking in bribes by the literal billions. 

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress is obsessed with Anthony Fauci and 45% of Americans will still vote for these corrupt fuckers. 

Class In America

Yglesias, the other day, raised the issue of how hard it is to define "class" in America. This is not a new challenge and it remains in many ways the single greatest obstacle that those self-styled socialists have in trying to win friends and influence people.

When Marx wrote back in the middle of the 19th century, he predicted that his communist revolution would most likely happen in America - a country he never set foot in. His reasoning was that the revolution had to occur in a place that had a highly developed industrial economy that relied on wage labor - the proletariat - coming to the realization that they were being exploited by capital - the bourgeoisie. Once they realized that, they would rise up in their numbers and overthrow the existing system of exploitation and replace it with a utopia where the fruits on industrial production would be shared equally.

So that never happened.

Where "communist" revolutions happened were in fact economically backwards societies like Russia, China and Cuba where you had the old feudal-style relationship between land owner and peasant. This was not at all what Marx predicted and predictably, those countries struggled to distribute the fruits of industrial production because they lacked industrial production. C'est la guerre.

This did lead to a bunch of feverish arguments all the way into the 20th century of why class-based politics never took hold in the US. Britain and other countries had Labour parties and Socialist Parties that routinely won elections. The Socialist Party in the US maxxed out with a 4th place finish in 1912. Despite real anger among many working class people, there simply never developed a fully "class conscious" proletariat in the United States.

Fast forward to the post-industrial US of today, the elements of class based politics is even tougher to create. Yglesias' jumping off point is the Graham Platner debacle in Maine, because Platner's definition of "working class" is so expansive, it's meaningless. Platner himself "qualifies" because he doesn't have a Bachelor's Degree, because he dropped out of college. He also went to Hotchkiss, which is not exactly working class. His attraction was that he seemed working class at first blush. He had a bushy beard; he was a veteran; he was an "oyster farmer." 

For that group of political consultants that elevated him to relevance, this was an antidote to "HR liberalism" that policed your pronouns and did land acknowledgements. (It was very much a gendered critique of current Democratic politics.) Platner looked credibly working class, so he must BE working class, and this will return working class voters to the Democratic Party.

Except wherever you look, including the current face off between the DSA Left and the Standard Liberal in the Michigan Senate primary, you see candidates like Platner or Abdul El-Sayed running much stronger amongst college educated voters than the "working class" voters that they purport to advocate for. In the NY House primaries, the DSA candidate defeated the head of the Hispanic Caucus by relying on voters in the Columbia University part of the district, not the Hispanic working class part of the district.

In other words, the biggest supporters of class-based leftwing politics are college educated voters who are not usually lumped into the "working class" basket. THOSE voters are not interested in "defund the police" or "Free Palestine". What's more, they typically don't really think government is going to work for them anyway, so what's the point in voting for someone who promises them "Medicare for All" when you don't expect Medicare to be there when you retire anyway?

Rather than grapple with this dynamic, WAAAAAY too many on that Left of Left of Center space are simply throwing out vibes candidates like Platner - who turned out to be a train wreck. You have a similar situation in Ohio's 7th CD, with a Republican who is credibly accused of violence against women facing another "working class" non-college graduate with some history of troublemaking in his past, too.

There is ONE version of class-based politics that I think does land, but I'm not sure who coined it: The Epstein Class. If you want to take down Trump and the GOP, that's a brilliant rhetorical flourish, because it links Trump's heavily implied crimes with Epstein's documented crimes with the heavily implied crimes of a bunch of rich creeps who hung out a private island and may or may not have raped a bunch of children. And except for Epstein, none of these super rich perverts has faced a whiff of legal consequences in this country. 

However, when you think about the "Epstein Class" you aren't differentiating between wage labor and salaried employees or between people who hold college degrees and those who don't. You're talking about a corrupt system whereby the very rich escape the consequences of their lawlessness. But if you simply attack the whole system as being corrupted beyond redemption, does that include the system that underwrites your mortgage? That raises taxes to educate your child? We are seeing the effects of dismantling the regulatory state in the explosive diarrhea moment. Isn't THAT system worth preserving?

If you're a DSA-type, you have to see the whole system as corrupt and needing to be replaced by a vanguard of non-politicians who arise from a working class that you likely never really were part of and who have no real credible plan to achieve their change via policy. Focusing instead on the specific corruption of Trumpism is less satisfying (especially because for many in the DSA, the real enemy isn't Trump but "establishment Dems").

Americans have never really seen themselves as part of a distinct class. Even in the Gilded Age and the New Gilded Age, when socio-economic mobility is deeply constrained, Americans have typically not seen themselves as "working class" and that term is now even more meaningless. As a teacher, am I working class? I have a graduate degree and a salary, so probably not. But you aren't going to create a mass class politics excluding people like me. In fact "people like me" are your most likely to embrace the DSA critique of America. 

I'll conclude by noting the most successful DSA politician in the country, Mamdani, has succeeded by being really good at providing public services and for embracing the joy of community. He's a really, really good administrator and a really, really good communicator. His popularity is not based on seizing the means of production, and where his earlier professions of DSA sort of politics like Defund the Police have caused him problems, he has simply jettisoned them. AOC also has a similar pragmatism to her politics. 

What we are seeing is that a pragmatic left is capable of real success, but waiting for Marx's moment of class consciousness is a non-starter.

Fever In The Heartland

 The other day, I finished Timothy Egan's book A Fever in the Heartland about the rise and fall of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Interestingly, I can remember a student paper from many years ago that tackled this same subject. In the '20s, the Klan was reinvented from a specifically Southern terror group aimed at unraveling Reconstruction to a national group simmering in the resentments of small town Protestant outrage over a changing America. They lashed out beyond their traditional hatred of Black political and economic autonomy, but also immigrants, cities, modernity and religions they felt were un-American.

Sound familiar?

Coming out of World War I and the Influenza pandemic of 1920 and centered in the struggling farm economy of the '20s, the resentment towards the new urban power was broadly held - especially in states without a center of gravity in the new industrial urban landscape. Places like Indiana, but also Colorado and Oregon, were natural centers of the new Invisible Empire.

Egan's book centers on D.C. Stephenson, a charismatic con artist and drifter, estranged from his family and harboring a deep need for sexual dominance. As he built up a massive empire, he took his cut from membership dues and bilked the rubes for their dollars. He was also a serial rapist.

Again, sound familar?

In the end, Stephenson - despite controlling the Klan that controlled Indiana - was put on trial for the rape and murder of a young woman. Even as the jury deliberated on his guilt the Klan slate of candidates won victories in the November election. However, shortly after the election, Stephenson was found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He expected a pardon from his creature in the governor's mansion, and when it didn't come, he exposed all the corruption that he had participated in with the elected officials who abandoned him. This caused a collapse in the Klan in the North. It would briefly resurrect itself again in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, but it would never again reach the heights it had in the 1920s.

Reading the book, it was impossible not to see the parallels to our own age. For instance, the widespread prevalence of sexual predators in the MAGA-sphere precisely mirrors the sexual violence in the Klan, which extended beyond Stephenson. The nurturing of resentments to create a climate of hatred is the classic "Populist" playbook, and it was not unique to the '20s Klan, but I think the more interesting question is not "Is the Klan's spiritual successor MAGA?" because it clearly is. The question is: If we finally get a full airing of Trump's sexual crimes - especially as it relates to Epstein - will that be enough to break the grip of this particular fever?

Pillaging

 This summer, I am writing a student reader - an abbreviated textbook replacement - to compensate for a new schedule with fewer class meetings and therefore fewer homework readings. Who cares about learning, when you can follow the trendy herd in school scheduling?

Anyway, I'm condensing six textbook readings on the Gilded Age into three readings (see "who cares about learning" above). As I do so, I find myself including things like posse comitatus or the Wong Kim Ark case that likely wouldn't be in an accelerated text, because they have such relevance today with Trump's plan.

This morning, I was reminded by a better historian than I that one of the primary assaults on the Post-Progressive State that Trump and Project 2025 have launched is on the idea of preserving public lands. The National Park system is something that my wife and I have inordinate fondness for. I doubt we will get to every single park - American Samoa and the Alaska parks around the Arctic Circle are a wee bit remote - but we are going to give it our best effort. In a few weeks, we are headed to Colorado to finally see Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Yeah, sure, sure, we are going to see our kids, but also Black Canyon of the Gunnison. 

Trump's decision to allow mineral exploitation of public lands and his efforts to shrink protected lands is something that isn't a headline in the avalanche of Trump's malfeasance and corrupt governance, though I would wager that bribes changed hands to make this happen. Some of this is corruption; some of this is kowtowing to businesses over the public weal; some of this is ideological hostility to a government that actually does things that people like; some of this is just "pwn the libtards."

What it is, is not good or popular. 

In the midst of our first Gilded Age, there were still enough public spirited people to create the National Park ideal. There were still enough farsighted people to see that preserving nature was both morally and economically proper. Republicans want to return us to the cavalcade of corruption and self-dealing of the first Gilded Age, but that age ended, and Dog willing this one will, too. 

Republicans Can't Govern

 Martin Longman looks at Trump's demand that his lickspittles in Congress pass a third reconciliation bill. He notes that one issue is that the last bill defunded Planned Parenthood, but that ban has just expired. There aren't the votes in an election year that is already shaping up as a bad one for Republicans to take on a bunch of unpopular votes. 

Longman notes

This is something people on the left are familiar with. The base is angry that the Republican leadership didn’t do something they didn’t have the votes to accomplish and feels demoralized because its representatives won’t fight with every tool in the box, even if those tools won’t work.

That's a pretty cogent analysis of the state of politics in America. For years, I've noted that Republicans can't govern, they can only rule. They cannot govern, because governing involves legislating, and their caucus is fucking insane. I certainly hope that some of the loopier DSA candidates who are going to enter the House this fall won't fall into the same batshit dynamic of demanding that their every whim is made into law and if it isn't, it must be corruption. 

Still, this isn't a bothsides moment. Biden was not as historically great a president as some have decided to make him out to be in their anger at the processes and his own decline depriving them of a victory in 2024. Still, Biden was exceptionally effective at getting legislation passed. There were enough Republicans in Congress still willing to legislate that important bills made it through. The tragic counterexample was when they had a really decent bipartisan immigration bill, and Trump killed it. 

That's the ballgame, when it comes to the current GOP and their inability to govern. They are now - even more than then - the Party of Trump and legislating, a process that involves compromise, good faith and trust, is anathema to him and the creatures that surround him.

This system of compromise and working together was why the Framers established checks and balance, separation of powers. No one person, no one faction was intended to rule this country. We would have to come together to govern it. To self-govern it. 

One of the many ways that Republicans have lost the plot.

200 v 250

 Krugman reminiscences about being in Lisbon in 1976 for the Bicentennial. I have my own faded memories about that celebration: the Tall Ships in NY harbor, the simple pleasure of being a kid at a time of picnics and fireworks. It seems odd to celebrate the document that asserted that true sovereignty lies with the people and not a monarch when a large portion of the this country seems to want to install a monarchy centered on an absolute dumpster fire of a human being. The Fourth is a time of sentimental idealism and nostalgia, yet we seem trapped in a dystopian moment of corruption, authoritarianism and just rank stupidity.

Yet, Krugman notes that the Bicentennial celebration was optimistic, in spite of the rather dreadful tenor of the times. We had just lost Vietnam, inflation plagued the land, we had rolling energy crises, crime was legitimately out of control, and we had just emerged from the Watergate scandal.

Krugman argues - and I'd agree - that in fact the Watergate resolution, with Nixon resigning in disgrace, abandoned by his party, was a large part of why were proud to be American. We had confronted the lawlessness of the most powerful man in America and called him to account. We had rebuked the concentration of power in the hands of a secretive cabal of criminality acting from the halls of the People's House. 

So, I get why today feels like a broken holiday, and why it is hard to celebrate a country that allows Donald Trump more latitude than it did Richard Nixon, despite Trump's crimes being immeasurably large in quantity and scope. 

When the Continental Congress voted to declare independence on July 2nd 250 years ago, that same day British troops landed on Staten Island. On August 22nd, they landed on Long Island and nearly enveloped Washington's army before it made a providential escape. Defeat on Long Island led to an abandonment of New York City - an abandonment that would last until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Washington was beaten again at White Plains in October and he limped into Pennsylvania with only the tattered remnants of his initial force. 

So, while today is the celebration and remembrance of that remarkable document that promised equality and self-government in the face of tyranny, I would point to another document, written in the aftermath of Washington's ignominious retreat from New York. Thomas Paine wrote in The Crisis:

 THESE are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated....

My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light. Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief break into my house, burn and destroy my property, and kill or threaten to kill me or those that are in it, and to “bind me in all cases whatsoever” to his absolute will, am I to suffer [permit] it? What signifies it to me whether he who does it is a King or a common man, my countryman or not my countryman? Whether it be done by an individual villain or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being who at the last day [final judgment] shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America.

Happy 4th.

Capture The Flag

 Yglesias writes about how tawdry it is to have the 250th anniversary of independence tarnished by a man who has no conception of what actually made America great. Take Trump's assault on birth rite citizenship. That's not a policy debate about contours of immigration policy, it's an attack on a fundamentally American Idea: America is not a single people, it's an aspirational idea.

Trump has defiled so many basic ideas - about democracy, self-government, the rule of law, America's role in a dangerous world, that "all men are created equal" - that it's totally understandable to feel robbed of the opportunity to celebrate this great and flawed nation.

I guess I disagree. I think the celebration of the Declaration of Independence is more vital this year than if Harris had won and Trump was languishing in a prison cell. 

Of all the many ways that Trump has disgraced his office and our country, none are as profound than his assault on democracy itself. Before becoming President in 2017, Trump had never taken the oath of office - either as a soldier or public official - the first person ever to assume the office without first serving the country in some other way. In fact, Trump never even had to answer to a Board of Directors for most of his career. The idea of checks and balances is as foreign to him as the Nepalese language is. The recent string of Supreme Court cases have served to largely inoculate Trump from Congressional oversight or criminal consequences. 

What's more, Trump's cultists are not the sort of people who think in abstract, ideological terms. Democracy or the rule of law in the abstract are not as important as a "businessman who gets things done." When Trump promised to "be a dictator on Day One" that was a selling point for MAGA.

It is at this historical moment that we need to revivify the language and purpose of the Declaration. "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" isn't as famous as "all men are created equal" but it's equally powerful and important as a hallmark of American political identity. 

I get why you might not feel like waving the flag this 4th of July. What you cannot do is cede the flag to a man whose every utterance is either an attack on America's founding principles or a verbal attack on America itself. How many times does Trump talk about how awful America is? He cannot go a day without denigrating some aspect of this country in ways that no other American president would even dream of doing. 

Do not let this creature destroy your love of what actually makes America great: the ability of the people to control their political destiny; the ability to create a "more perfect union" rather than accept the current limitations; the very real opportunity that this land and people have offered millions of immigrants to build a new and better life. 

If you let the shortcoming of this country define it for you - as quite a few leftist commentators tend to do - then you are basically doing the same thing Trump does: "We're no angels."

This country is far, far from perfect - no country is. But what is good about it is worth fighting for.

Precarity

 Paul Campos writes about a Times story on how $130,000 for a family of four really isn't enough money to live comfortably. The Times story looks at several areas where the above average family is struggling to make ends meet. When it comes to groceries, the toughest area to make ends meet is...meat. Beef prices are indeed really high right now, having risen 33% over the past two years.

What's striking is how much of this is policy based. The screwworm infestation is a result of Trump and Musk's gutting of various programs. There's a drought - thanks global warming. There's Trump's tariffs. The piece doesn't mention it, but deportations are likely to hurt meatpackers. 

Housing remains a real chokepoint for spending, and Trump is pitching a hissy fit over Congress' inability to pass his voter suppression act - the SAVE act - so he's not going to sign the recent bipartisan bill to help bring housing costs down (or at least help arrest their growth). It might become law without his signature, which is a really perfect example of Trumpism: deny the importance of legislation in governance. He killed the immigration reform bill from 2024. He passed his one piece of legislation and now wants to govern without consulting Congress.

This is the issue that bedeviled Biden, and his administration actually tried to address it. Trump called affordability a "made up Dumocrat word" so it's going to be hard to pivot for Republicans. Then there is the visual indictment of him trying to create some sort of Roman spectacle in DC. 

Having fucking idiots in charge of economic policy is really hard.

What's interesting, and neither Campos nor the Times addressed this, is that we've had this dynamic before in the 1970s. The difference is that we had far less wealth inequality in the '70s. So we not only have rising prices, but we have an elite that is just completely out of touch with the experience of even upper middle class Americans. If Elon Musk is making decisions about policy, you have a badly distorted policy environment.

If we begin to save American democracy this fall, we will be in a situation where Democrats will have to clean this mess up. Again. The problem is that one key pillar of solving this mess will be addressing the exploding national debt and the solvency of Social Security. There are limits to the ability of raising taxes on the rich that will be hard to resolve.

Anyway, Republicans suck, in case you were wondering. 

Civic Education

 In his mailbag, Yglesias talks about "stealth democracy."

Stealth democracy is a theory that people have this idea that all that is required to solve a problem is for people of goodwill to sit down and hash out their disagreements like colleagues do. They see "corruption" as any action by a government that does not really benefit them. Sure, they can see things like Trump's desecration of the White House and DC in general as being "corrupt" for THAT reason, when the real reason is that he is accruing money to himself and his family and acting outside the cover of law. 

This misconception about "corruption" is really interesting. 

The elections in NYC are the flavor of the minute, and the factionalism expressed there is not an advantage for the Democratic Party in November. Adults - or at least people who really understand our politics and history - understand that you need a Big Tent to win elections, and what resonates in the congressional district around Columbia University does not resonate 25 miles to the north. Still, elements of the Left - and I do not really include Mamdani here - think that if a Democrat representing suburban Yonkers has a difference of opinion on, say, Israel, that isn't a difference of opinion. It's "corruption." They are corrupted by AIPAC.

(I need to take a moment and express my exasperation with the primacy of the Israeli-Palestine issue in Leftist politics at the moment. I fully support the idea that Israel has and continues to commit war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank; I do not think it is genocide, but I understand the arguments that it is. I fully support conditioning American military aid to Israel on the ousting of Netanyahu from power and Israel re-committing to a two-state solution. What I do NOT agree with, is that this is the most important issue facing this country. It is not in the top-10. Ultimately, much of the Israel-Palestine discourse feels performative, and that's just exhausting and not a path to winning control of Congress this fall. <end rant>"

Back to the issue at hand. So much of our politics - from MAGA to the DSA - seems fixated on a version of politics that is simply false. Yes, there is corruption, and Trump is so far and away our most corrupt president, that second place isn't even in the same league. You'd have to run through about 20 Trump scandals before landing on a previous scandal of similar depth. Most of those did not involve the direct participation of the president himself. Only Watergate rises to that level, maybe Iran-Contra. 

So, Trump is legit corrupt. When members of Congress disagree with each other, THAT IS NOT CORRUPTION. 

We've reached this perilous moment, because our parties are more ideological than perhaps they have ever been, and Trump adds breathless stupidity to the mix. The left of the Republican Party does not overlap with the right of the Democratic Party in any meaningful way. When they actually DO accomplish something, like Chris Murphy and James Lankford coming together to fix the immigration system, it gets blown up by Trump. The same thing could be happening with the bipartisan housing bill, but I think that has the votes to override Trump's veto. 

You've had this sort of venomous partisan discord since the '90s, but at least some of it was performative. That's the old "Senate Club" idea, where they yell at each other on CNN and then go have dinner together. Trump, because he has no saving graces or subtlety of thought, has turned that into a politics of grievance that has truly broken Congress and perhaps American democracy. Election denialism is really an offshoot of this. Democrats cannot legitimately win an election is not a position Newt Gingrich or Tom Delay would have entertained.

All of this is to say, we have to find a way out of this moment. 

People do not seem to understand the basics of how democratic governance and politics actually work. Hey, sometimes you lose an election! That's not corruption! Sometimes a good bill dies for bad reasons. That's not corruption! Sometimes there really aren't easy solutions to problems! That's not corruption! 

I've argued that we live in a consumer culture where we really don't have to compromise. You never have to go to Blockbuster only to find out the movie you wanted is checked out and then you have to compromise on whether to watch the rom-com or the action-buddy movie. You just click and stream. 

We've made much of our society frictionless and that simply isn't how politics works. Our whole system is based on friction! That's the point of the separation of powers. 

Instead, both the median voter AND the voters at the extremes simply decry the whole thing as "corrupt" because they can't get what they want all the time. 

That allows a demagogic troll to eviscerate our national institutions, just in time for the 250th anniversary of republican self-government. 

UPDATE: Slightly different take on the same issue of "corruption" from Martin Longman.

UPDATE II: Yet another take on the rise of "dirtbagism."

Not So Sure About This One

 Krugman makes the case that today we have more oligarchic politics than the last Gilded Age. He uses a few crude numbers to argue that we have more wealth concentrated in the hands of a few individuals now than we did 140 years ago. I think that is probably true, because the nature of wealth overall has changed. I also agree with him that there were some cultural guardrails that encouraged men of great wealth to fund some form of charitable work. In fact, I remember Ted Turner working to shame people like Bill Gates into throwing some of his wealth into charity - and it worked!  The Gates Foundation does great work.

Some of the comparisons Krugman makes are not very apt. The Gilded Age did not see a president as corrupt as Trump - no such figure has ever existed. However, just about every other level of government was absolutely saturated with a depth of corruption that is just inconceivable today. This corruption launched two broad political movements: Populism and Progressivism. 

These two movements were demographically dissimilar, but they shared ideological DNA: namely that American democracy had become a corrupted oligarchy. This was why the Progressive Amendments were addressing. The income tax, the direct election of Senators, even woman suffrage and Prohibition, were all efforts to redeem American democracy. 

Why Prohibition? Because alcohol and the saloon were at the heart of vote-buying and machine politics. You think partisanship is bad today (it certainly is), but in the Gilded Age the parties largely existed to distribute graft rather than public services. This was at the heart of Garfield's assassination. In order to win elections and control the distribution of graft, votes were bought with alcohol. Additionally, the parties were not ideological but rather demographic. Violence often attended elections, as mobs roamed the streets looking for people from the opposite party. Voting was not done by secret ballot, so people knew who you voted for. 

Finally, while we have more wealth inequality than we had back in the Gilded Age, we also have more overall wealth. Every vice of poverty that we can imagine today existed back then. The poor of 1890 were crushingly poor. Tuberculosis would cut through tenements like a scythe carrying off children by the hundreds. Farmers were so burdened by debt that they stormed the Kansas capital with guns trying to get relief. 

There was no food assistance, no public health, no income tax, no worker safety measures, no medical care for the young or elderly, no protections against child labor, no protections against monopolies, no civil rights for anyone but white men, no protections for women...it was grim.

I don't think things are going great. However, the one restraint Trump is facing is the fact that there are still laws in this country and they still have force. Go look at the tarps on the Kennedy Center. 

Things are bad. The Gilded Age was crushingly awful.

Gordon Wood

 Gordon Wood died yesterday at the age of 92, amazingly struck down by a car and not his advanced age. Wood was one of the finest living historians of US History and certainly the Dean of Historians when it came to the American Revolution. Himself a student of Bernard Bailyn, Wood argued for the essential revolutionary nature of the American Revolution. He stood against some - and I occasionally include myself - that argued that it was more a War of Independence than a true "revolution," especially if compared against the French or Russian Revolutions. In this telling, the Civil War and Reconstruction Era is much more of a revolution than replacing the monarchy with a representative government.

But of course, establishing a Republic - over so large an area no less - was a revolutionary act. It was fraught with pitfalls and dangers that the generation that framed the Constitutions was very much aware of. 

None more so than James Madison.

It was Madison who spent years thinking about how to preserve liberty and self-government. Today, we think of them as being reinforcing, but it was understood at the time that self-government tended to degenerate to anarchy, which led to the rise of a dictator. As Madison wrote in the Federalist: 

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

This framework is at the heart of our long practice in representative government, of combining democracy and republicanism to create something truly new over 235 years ago when the Constitution was written. 

As Richardson notes at the link above, Madison was also the author of the Bill of Rights. Initially reluctant, he came to see how writing down fundamental rights was part of the needed constraints on those who governed, especially the desire of those who - once in power - might wish to restrict the freedom of the press to blunt criticism of themselves, or perhaps ban public assemblies and petitions to the same purpose. 

It also extended to the free practice of religion, which had been pioneered by Roger Williams of Rhode Island in the 17th century, but then picked up by Virginians like Madison and Thomas Jefferson. If a government could dictate religious belief and practice, what couldn't they dictate? The free exercise of conscience preceded all other rights.

As we begin to mark the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, we can see these "inalienable rights" under assault from a cabal of wicked people who surround a fundamentally ignorant and weak bully who would destroy those very rights that the Revolution was fought over. Pete Hegseth wants to tell servicemember how to worship. Various creatures wish to destroy the free press and outlaw protests. This is not hyperbole. 

Wood's death - just a few weeks before the 250th anniversary of the declaration of universal, inalienable rights - should help us reflect on how those rights which were so revolutionary 250 years ago are not self-enforcing. Wood reminded us that we are heirs to a revolutionary tradition, and at the heart of the revolution was the belief that government must belong to the governed. 

The Summer Of His Discontent

 Richardson lays out what a shitty week Don Trumpeone just had. The Senators whose jobs he took away are pissed, the Courts are removing the presumption of good faith by government lawyers, and his efforts to aggrandize himself are falling flat. 

Perhaps nothing so perfectly captures this moment as his quagmire in Iran. He can't surrender even though he's been beaten strategically, because Trump's whole schtick is that he's a "winner." He could no more admit defeat in Iran than in the 2020 election. He has exactly zero good options here and the clock is ticking on enough Congressional Republicans to spit the bit and invoke the War Powers Act. 

Meanwhile, gas prices aren't budging, and with gas reserves being drawn down, we are potentially about to hit another spike in prices. Regardless, ending the war tomorrow would not restore either the reserves nor the pre-war prices. It will take months to get prices down to pre-war levels, a timeline that likely extends beyond the midterms. 

His floundering abroad and his sabotage of Senate Republicans may finally have enough members start to push back against his monarchical pretensions. People are legitimately pissed about the ballroom, the arch, the reflecting pool, the gilded tackiness, the plans for a $250 bill with his ugly mug on it, his indifference to people's economic distress, his tariffs, the rising cost of fertilizers, high interest rates from deficit spending and inflation...you get the idea.

These craven lickspittles in the GOP thought that if they embraced Trump just enough that would save them. Instead, insufficient fealty leads to the fates of Tom Tillis, Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn. Too much fealty could drag down unpopular faux Trumpists like Lindsay Graham.

I'm fascinated by what will happen around July 4th. It should be a moment of national celebration. Even the Bicentennial, laden as it was with inflation and the stench of Watergate, felt like a reprieve from our malaise. I have to wonder if this 250th anniversary will feel more like an expression of revolutionary rage than the nostalgia that Trump craves. 

An Evangelical Christianity Problem

 Richardson lays out the case against presuming America is a "Christian Nation." This is - ironically - against the backdrop of another one of Trump's grifts, this one surrounding the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump and his creatures are trying to hijack the celebration of America articulating the idea of limited, representative government to create a cult of personality around Trump and elevate the ahistorical idea that America was founded for White Christian Men. (Ok, yes, men, but still.)

When thinking about "conservatism" in general, we should understand that conservatism has a preference for established hierarchies. That's not always bad, but it obviously can stand in the way of human progress, which is the essential tension in most democratic politics.

Trumpism and the modern GOP is not even "conservative" in that sense. They are not trying to protect established hierarchies, they are trying to revivify old ones - ones that previous generations disassembled. An obvious example is the effective ending of the Voting Rights Act, in order to re-establish White Supremacist government in the South. 

This twisted form of Christian Nationalism that Trump and his cadre of institutional arsonists are trying to create is a deference to a hierarchy that Americans have never really cottoned to: one that deifies the sitting president. Trump routinely calls members of the press who challenge him on anything - even questions of fact - "traitors" because in this mindset, questioning the president is treason to the country, because l'Etat c'est moi.  

This blinkered, chauvinistic version of Christianity is a fringe sect, but it still constitutes millions of Americans and the very bedrock of Trump's support. If you believe that a literal angel sits on your shoulder and protects you from the temptations of demons, I guess you can believe that Trump is a savvy businessman sent by God to redeem this nation. 

Max Weber referred to the period when America wrote its founding documents - the period known as the Enlightenment - as the "disenchanting of the world." The magical thinking Christians wish to re-enchant the world. This blind deference to authority is not only deeply un-American, it is a prime grifting opportunity, a tradition that goes back to the fictional Elmer Gantry and the very real Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and however many youth pastors who raped children. 

A Most Unamerican Speech; A Most American Speech

 Donald Trump, yesterday, droned the words that Stephen Miller wrote for him about America being a racial project. He basically asserted that America was a nation-state for white, Anglo-Saxons. There's a version of this speech - delivered with the King Charles standing next to him - that might have made sense. 

In fact, Charles later gave that speech to Congress.

Where Trump spoke of some sort of racial and genetic connection - "Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage." - Charles spoke of American ideals, including the value of bringing diverse voices together in a national project. If there was a connection between Britain and America, it was in the preservation of liberty through checks on Executive power, as was written into the Magna Carta and the Constitution. (In fact, the Magna Carta is somewhat more prominent a document in America than Britain.) Where Trump intoned the idea that America was a project of white Anglo-Saxons, Charles said "the essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, or none."

The King of England continued: “Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice. These features created the conditions for centuries of unmatched economic growth in our two countries.”

It was telling that when he affirmed support for Ukraine, he received a standing ovation. This, while Trump and Netanyahu move closer to Putin.

Trump's virulent social media team released a picture of Charles and Trump that read "TWO KINGS." While this is a direct troll of the No Kings protest movement, it is also the agenda to destroy checks and balances and create a form of personal rule that would be indistinguishable from a monarchy.

TL;DR: The King of England - the descendant of King George - gave a more American speech than the "president" of the United States.

Cursed

 Krugman makes a clickbaity argument that the US might be suffering from the resource curse. The resource curse take two forms. The one I'm most familiar with is that poorer, developing countries that have abundant mineral wealth are usually autocratic. The reason is the inverse of the old revolutionary slogan, "No taxation with representation." In a resource state, there is no need for taxation so there is no representation. Additionally, control of the government means control of the resource (usually oil), and that means losing control of the government means losing access to all that wealth. 

Krugman does not seem to be argument that for the US, and I would agree, we aren't in that state. Yesterday's No Kings rallies may have had 8,000,000 attendees. I would say that they one I attended was not necessarily better attended than the one in the fall, but that supportive honking by passersby was higher. Protesting is...weird. It does however stand in for civic engagement. 

The reason why the US is not likely to rely on resources to become a petrostate is twofold. The first is that despite being the world's largest oil producer, oil is still a relative small part of our overall economy. If you want to get rich in America, you go to Wall Street or Silicon Valley, not to Washington, DC to extract rents from the oil industry. 

The second reason is that America already has a well-established democracy. Yes, Trump is waging wholescale war on our democratic institutions and norms, but just like his war against Iran, his tactical wins do not mean strategic victory. Part of the "logic" of authoritarianism and the heart of Project 2025 is that you can simply overwhelm the opposition through "strength" and speed of action. Trump has achieved speed of action - again, in both his assaults on America's democratic institutions and Iran's military infrastructure. However, he cannot understand that the opposition gets its say, too. 

American history is not a triumphal march of progress. It is a long and painful conflict between our ideals and our baser instincts. It is messy. Right now, it seems like everything is unravelling. However, as I said a few months ago, as a political scientist, I would argue that you should be afraid. As a historian, I would argue that you should be patient.

Dire Straits

 Josh Marshall has been tracking the impact of Iran's threats to shipping through the Straits of Hormuz. Basically, there was no planning and insurance carriers can't insure all these ships.

This basic level of fuck up is exactly what we should expect from an administration of Fox News rejects, podcasters and mediocre white supremacists. Any idiot could have predicted that Iran would close the Straits, just like any idiot could have predicted that American citizens (and others) might not want to be stranded in a war zone. In Afghanistan, the collapse was so fast and unpredictable that there probably wasn't anything that could be done. This was a war of choice being planned for weeks, if not months. 

And apparently no one considered the fact that Iran might strike back at the Straits or at commercial air traffic?

Fucking morons.

The Contingency Of History

 Martin Longman runs through a connection I had not known about. A critical moment in the history of Iran was the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, as it is often difficult to retain a revolutionary ideology after the charismatic leader of that revolution dies. It's what Max Weber referred to as the "routinization of charisma" and it's hard to pull off.

The logical successor to Khomeini was Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri. He was the most senior and respected cleric in Iran, and Khomeini's ideology required that the most senior cleric by in charge of the rule by religious authority. There was an friend of Montazeri named Mehdi Hashemi who was a complete asshole and got sideways of Khomeini, and that blew up in Montazeri's face.

I knew that this had happened, but I didn't know about Hashemi's role in this.

The reason this is important is that Montazeri was not completely wedded to the idea of the velayat-e faqih or rule by religious authority. He certainly wasn't a fan of trying to export the Iranian Revolution.

Ali Khamenei was.

In the span before his death, Khomeini worked with Ali Rafsanjanah - a nakedly cynical man - to elevate Khamenei over Montazeri. Khamenei was a revolutionary ideologue and Iran continued down the path that now has it as a pariah state at war with all of its neighbors.

I believe that history is largely about big forces, but individuals matter. What would have happened, for instance, if James Comey doesn't announce his investigation in Hillary Clinton's emails and/or the Stormy Daniels story gets out in October of 2016. What happens if Clinton wins is pretty obvious. Donald Trump never sniffs public office and America and the world is in a better place.