Looking Ahead to the Trumpian Bloody Shirt by Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

Looking Ahead to the Trumpian Bloody Shirt

46Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memoby Josh Marshall / 4h

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October 24, 2019

For all the antics among House Republicans, what is most notable from their Senate Republican colleagues is silence. No Republican senator besides Mitt Romney is meaningfully criticizing the President. I continue to hear that in closed door caucus meetings the attitude toward the President and the widening scandal is considerably more hostile to the President and fearful than one might suspect. Sen. John Thune, a consummate party man, likely gave some hint of this when he told reporters yesterday that “the picture coming out of [the impeachment inquiry] based on the reporting we’ve seen is, yeah, I would say is not a good one.” Of course, if we had a dime for every time we’ve heard about private criticism of President Trump that never goes public we wouldn’t need to work so hard to drive up our membership numbers here at TPM. But there’s another point that is worth exploring about the Republican Senate.

It’s not all about voting to impeach or acquit.

I often hear people say that Republicans always have an easy out whenever they choose to take it: if Trump becomes too radioactive, just cut him loose, move on to Pence and have all the policy goodies they want and none of the constant embarrassment and chaos. That assumption entirely mistakes the current make up of the Republican Party, and, indeed, American politics generally. There is simply no scenario in which the GOP can easily quit the President or do so without driving a major, divisive and lasting wedge through the center of the party.

Four years ago Will Saletan said the GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord. That is still the case, though you’d have to say the deal has worked out pretty well for the GOP so far. But the downsides are simply the flip of the upsides. Trump’s rule has been so durable because despite his unpopularity he maintains the intense support of a large minority of the electorate. For a mix of demographic and geographical reasons it is a minority that generally over-performs in electoral terms.

Since he entered office President Trump has hovered right around 40% approval or one or two points higher. We may speculate that as much as 10% of this number isn’t entirely comfortable with Trump but supports him out of partisan attachment: They’re Republicans. He’s the Republican President. That’s enough. But probably 30% and certainly more than 20% are deeply attached to Trump, not only for his few relative points of ideological heterodoxy (trade restrictions, isolationism, etc.) but much more for his embodiment of an authoritarian and illiberal worldview both at home and abroad. These voters will have a very hard time forgiving any Republican leaders who turn on Trump and try to drive him from office. He has simply remade the party so thoroughly around an emotive ecosystem of dominance, obedience and betrayal.

Trump has built his political movement and persona around the politics of grievance and resentment. These are the taproots of the version of American conservatism we now call Trumpism. But Trump embodied and thus sealed and deepened those tendencies in a transformative way. Any partisan would resent politicians who turned on a leader to whom they felt a profound loyalty. But none like pro-Trump diehards.

The facts of the Ukraine extortion plot seem pretty clear cut. The political fallout is less clear — specifically how firm Trump’s heretofore impregnable wall of GOP defense will remain. It is still unlikely that any substantial number of Republicans will vote to impeach or remove the President from office. But if the scandal continues on its current trajectory, there’s really no scenario in which most Republican senators won’t face a damaging outcome whichever side of the impeachment question they come down on. Voting against the President would in almost all cases remain the most damaging choice — even if a substantial majority of the public believes the President’s actions are indefensible (something a number of Senate Republicans appear to have privately concluded already.)

In the unlikely event that President Trump is removed from office or compelled to resign, the sense of betrayal and grievance from probably half of Republicans will be intense and long lasting. Late in his presidency Richard Nixon was able to rely on the support of rightwing diehards and the sense of grievance about a liberal establishment ganging up on the President. But Republicans were able to recover internal coherence fairly quickly after Nixon’s fall because to conservatives and the Movement Right, Nixon was never really one of them. That’s very different for Trump. He embodies their politics and he’s governed exclusively in their interest.

Don’t expect major defections. But that’s not really the question. The real issue is that Republicans are trapped with someone they can’t cut loose.

Bill Barr’s First Epistle to the Heathens on The New Republic by Matt Ford

Bill Barr’s First Epistle to the Heathens

 

The New Republic 

 

by Matt Ford / 1h

 

October 22, 2019

 

Attorney General Bill Barr is a busy man these days. When he’s not personally traveling to Italy to investigate bizarre conspiracy theories about the 2016 election or ending the de facto moratorium on federal executions, he’s giving speeches to a variety of audiences. One of them is attracting far more attention than usual. His speech on religious liberty at the University of Notre Dame earlier this month was a broadside against those he held responsible for Christianity’s decline in American life.
“This is not decay; it is organized destruction,” Barr warned. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.” These forces, he argued, pose a fundamental threat to religious liberty and to people of faith in general—one that he pledges to fight as attorney general.
Reactions to Barr’s speech were unsurprising. The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher wrote that his fellow religious conservatives “should ponder the fact that under Donald Trump, as awful as he is in so many ways, a man of William Barr’s convictions is heading up the Department of Justice” when thinking about the 2020 election. “It is inconceivable that any Democratic president would put a man like him in charge of the Justice Department,” he wrote. “In fact, we are getting a good idea that a Democratic president would likely choose his precise opposite.”
Conversely, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman warned that Barr “is sounding remarkably like America’s most unhinged religious zealots, the kind of people who insist that we keep experiencing mass murder because schools teach the theory of evolution. Guns don’t kill people — Darwin kills people!” He argued that the speech reflects a broader effort among Trump’s closest allies in the evangelical community “to use the specter of secularism to distract people from their boss’s sins,” especially as the House’s impeachment inquiry gathers public support.

The attorney general is the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, not its top theologian.

The truth lies elsewhere. Barr’s speech was not a political ploy to defend the president. It’s an honest recitation of his personal beliefs. That’s the problem. The attorney general is the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, not its top theologian. Like any civil servant, Barr is supposed to work on behalf of all Americans and not just some of them. His speech undermined that principle by articulating a vision of state power that favors those who share his particular religious beliefs over those who don’t.
Barr’s central argument is that American democracy can only survive if the people it represents are guided by a higher moral authority that constrain their individual passions. Religion, particularly the Christian faith, provides the civic virtue and ethical restraint that makes self-government possible. “Modern secularists dismiss this idea of morality as other-worldly superstition imposed by a kill-joy clergy,” Barr said. “In fact, Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct. They reflect the rules that are best for man, not in the by and by, but in the here and now. They are like God’s instruction manual for the best running of man and human society.”
Over the last 40 years, Barr says, this foundation has been undermined by those who seek to drive Christianity from the public sphere. “By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim,” he said. “Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground. [...] Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.”
This correlation doesn’t hold up as a causation. Weaker community bonds and growing isolation can indeed feed into what researchers call “deaths of despair,” especially among middle-aged white Americans. But declining religiosity is a less persuasive factor for these social ills than economic inequality and other policy choices. Secularism didn’t ship 21 million opioids to a West Virginia town with fewer than 3,000 residents; drug manufacturers who prioritized profits over human lives did that. The disturbing rise in U.S. suicides can also be more easily linked to meager mental health care resources and the ubiquity of firearms than moral relativism.
It’s also worth noting that some indicators of social health are ticking upwards despite Christianity’s ebbing presence in American life. The national rate of violent crimes dropped by half since the 1990s—the last time that Barr served as attorney general. His concerns about “licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct” also seem slightly unmoored from the available evidence. Fewer teenagers are having sex or getting pregnant now than they were thirty years ago. Today’s youth are so abstinent from sexual behavior compared to past generations that The Atlantic wondered last December if the nation was in the middle of a “sex recession.”
Barr’s reference to “angry and alienated young males” is particularly striking because of what he doesn’t list as threats to religious liberty and the “traditional moral order.” He does not mention, for example, the gunman who killed six members of a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012. Or the one who murdered nine black parishioners in Charleston in 2015. Or the one who killed eleven Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue last year—the deadliest anti-Semitic massacre in the history of the republic. Anti-Semitic hate crimes recently surged to some of their highest recorded levels in the last 40 years.
It’s hard to imagine a more urgent threat to the free exercise of religious beliefs than these attacks. I don’t doubt that Barr is troubled by them. But their omission from his narrative simply underscores that his concern isn’t so much about the future of religious liberty, but the future of Christian hegemony in American public life.
That concern is somewhat well-founded. A Pew Research Center report released last Friday found that the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians now stands at 65 percent, a 12 percent drop from 2009. That decline is matched by a 17 percent rise in Americans without a religious affiliation, who now make up 26 percent of the population. By focusing on the immediate political context, Krugman missed the deeper social and cultural currents that animate not only Barr’s remarks, but similar fears throughout the religious right.
“Today, 62 percent of Christians say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month, which is identical to the share who said the same in 2009,” Pew reported. “In other words, the nation’s overall rate of religious attendance is declining not because Christians are attending church less often, but rather because there are now fewer Christians as a share of the population.” The generational divides are even more stark: Pew found that 84 percent of the Silent Generation and 76 percent of baby boomers describe themselves as Christian, while only 49 percent of millennials do so.
Those figures help explain why Barr devoted so much of his attention to education. “To me, this is the most serious challenge to religious liberty,” he said. “For anyone who has a religious faith, by far the most important part of exercising that faith is the teaching of that religion to our children. The passing on of the faith. There is no greater gift we can give our children and no greater expression of love. For the government to interfere in that process is a monstrous invasion of religious liberty.”
To that end, he criticized New Jersey and other states for requiring “an LGBT curriculum that many feel is inconsistent with traditional Christian teaching,” especially if parents can’t opt out. He lambasted state legislatures that don’t want to send taxpayer funds to private religious schools. And he said the Justice Department would intervene on behalf of the Catholic archdiocese in Indianapolis in a lawsuit brought by a Catholic school teacher who was fired for marrying her wife. “If these measures are successful, those with religious convictions will become still more marginalized,” he warned.
Other high-profile violations of religious liberty in recent years went unmentioned. It’s not surprising that he didn’t cite the Muslim ban that President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail and imposed in office with the Supreme Court’s assent. Nor did he cite the Justice Department’s intervention two years ago on behalf of a Virginia Muslim community that couldn’t obtain a permit to build a mosque. This spring, the justices even refused to delay the execution of a Muslim death-row prisoner in Georgia while he challenged a state policy that allowed a Protestant Christian minister to be in the execution chamber during the process, but not the clergy of his own faith.

The common thread that runs through Barr’s speech is power.

The common thread that runs through Barr’s speech is power. In his telling, those who undermine Christianity’s preeminent status in American society are the one who wield and abuse it. “The problem is not that religion is being forced on others,” he said. “The problem is that irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith. This reminds me of how some Roman emperors could not leave their loyal Christian subjects in peace but would mandate that they violate their conscience by offering religious sacrifice to the emperor as a god.”
That comparison is enlightening, though not in the way Barr intended. The attorney general is not an unarmed prisoner staring down a lion in the Colosseum; he is one of the emperor’s most powerful magistrates. The Trump administration is a living testament to the Christian right’s political power in 21st century America. And while Trump himself is not known for adhering to a Christian moral code, he has staffed his administration with figures like Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other religious conservatives who shape public policy every day.
Barr noted that the previous administration took a different approach. He cited the Obama administration’s efforts to enforce the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate on Christian-led companies and organizations that invoked religious-freedom claims. What he left out is that those groups have largely triumphed in the courts. The Supreme Court is more favorable towards religious-liberty claims today than they’ve been at any other time in the past 50 years. Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s conservative justices have handed victory after victory after victory to those claims in recent years. Thanks to Trump, they’ll likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
This dynamic is not healthy for American politics. Those who’ve found a moral and ethical foundation beyond Christianity aren’t going anywhere. And while Christians may be declining in relative influence, they aren’t vanishing from public life any time soon. (If anything, the history of Christianity is a history of surviving and thriving amidst the heathens.) The only viable option is peaceful coexistence, with all the vexations and frustrations that it brings. Public officials should work to bring us closer to that goal. Barr’s sectarian vision only pushes us toward a darker path.

 

 

Let’s Understand What the “Deliverable” Really WasEditors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Let’s Understand What the “Deliverable” Really Was

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 50min

One of the in-process leaks from today’s closed door testimony on Capitol Hill is that Bill Taylor, acting Ambassador to Ukraine, said that military aid shipments were made contingent on a public declaration to investigate the Bidens and 2016 election conspiracy theories. This was pretty clearly discussed and confirmed in those text messages which ex-envoy Kurt Volker turned over to Congress earlier this month. (Impeachment investigators later released them to the public). But there’s a key wrinkle of this part of the story that is important to absorb.

We hear a lot about “investigations”, “digging up dirt”, “manufacturing dirt”, etc. Indeed, the initial press reports on those Volker text messages had it that Sondland and Volker were trying to lock President Zelensky in to investigating with a public statement. In their view, the Ukrainians kept promising or making it seem like they’d work with Rudy on his sham investigation but didn’t follow through.

This makes clear that’s not exactly what was happening.

The public declaration wasn’t just a way to get the Ukrainians to commit themselves. It was actually the “deliverable” in itself.

Remember, there’s really no there there in the whole Rudy/Biden thicket of conspiracy theories. Yes, Hunter Biden was a privileged son and he clearly got work to a significant extent because of his name. But there were no shakedowns or threats or firings or investigations or really anything. There’s no there there. So even an aggressive effort to manufacture damaging information could only be so successful. Really though that wasn’t necessary. Having the government, indeed the President of Ukraine himself, make a high profile declaration that the accusations were legitimate, that crimes were probable and that the government was launching an investigation would probably have been more than enough to fatally wound Biden’s candidacy. It certainly would have been more than enough to get pretty much the entire political press in the US to see it as a live and legitimate issue. Whether there was ever any proof of anything, whether there was even any kind of actual investigation barely matters. That was enough. Those Volker texts alone show that was the real issue. Taylor just provides more granular detail.

Let’s also remember that it wasn’t just the Bidens. It was also probes into conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the DNC framing Russia for election interference as well as Paul Manafort. Again, as nonsensical as that was, that public declaration would be more than enough to radically shift the nature of the political debate in the US. How can you really be so sure Ukraine didn’t play some unknown role in the 2016 election or frame Russia and Trump if they’re basically saying they think they might have?

The public declaration was if not the whole enchilada, a good 90% of the enchilada. And they almost got it.

Are White Evangelicals as Concerned About Middle Eastern Christians as We’re Meant to Believe?

Are White Evangelicals as Concerned About Middle Eastern Christians as We’re Meant to Believe?

Oct 21, 2019, 1:46pm John Stoehr

If the lives of Middle East Christians mattered so much to white evangelical leaders, they’d do everything in their power, which is a lot, to pressure Trump to reverse his terrible choice. They will not, however, for three reasons. 

 

 

 

 

 

Screen shot of Franklin Graham telling the Christian Broadcasting Network's anchors that he 'respects' the president's decision to pull troops from the Syrian border and that he doesn't want to 'second-guess' the decision less than a week after calling for Trump to reconsider.

 CBN News

I am going to say something that I have never before said in public. I have professed my faith in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. 

More than once, actually. 

I don’t remember how many times. Maybe half a dozen? I do remember each time had the same empirical result, which is to say no empirical result. I was the same after as I was before. I knew nothing had changed because my Christian upbringing taught the importance of the truth. What I didn’t know then, and what seems obvious now, is that the truth isn’t The Truth.

Years later my dad asked if I was saved. It was important to him. I said yes, and I felt like a liar. Then I realized there’s no way he could prove I wasn’t. Faith, after all, isn’t falsifiable. Telling him I was “saved” had the same small-T truth to it as saying I accepted Jesus, which is to say, no truth at all. Saying the words of the profession of faith in Christ did not actuate my inner moral conscience anymore than saying abracadabra.

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To born-again Christians, the event I describe here, in which you profess your faith in God who gave His only Begotten Son to be sacrificed on the Cross of Calvary so that Man might be forgiven his Sins, is seminal. The revelation of God’s Power and Glory is supposed to be a turning point one reflects on in old age in search of wisdom to pass on to youngsters embarking on their own walk with the Lord. It is the implicit or explicit lesson to every Sunday school class, every Bible story, and every sermon. Everything about born-again Christianity is bent toward the goal of your being born again. The only thing missing is how to be a good person. 

For me to say that the words of profession of my faith in Jesus did not actuate my moral conscience any more than saying abracadabra did isn’t merely offensive to born-again Christians. It’s also confounding. I mean, the point of being born again is to avoid burning for an eternity in a Lake of Fire. What’s morality got to do with that? (The people I’m describing, by the way, are all white. I have no unique insight into African-American evangelical religion or culture.) 

My argument here is kind of the inverse of Martin Luther’s. The German theologian who launched the Reformation came to believe that “good works” did not bring salvation. Doing the right thing was not the way to Heaven. Salvation, he argued, could be justified by faith alone. Moral action wasn’t enough. You really had to believe. 

This makes sense when you think about it from Martin Luther’s point of view. He was fighting the idea of—actually the widespread practice of—salvation through the cash purchase of little pieces of paper that said you are now absolved of such-and-such sin. If I were Luther, I might want to reform such blatant corruption, too. I’d want people to be truthful in the practice of their virtue. Dispensations are empty vessels, and that’s no way to build a religious community. Instead, corruption is a way to tear it down.

I’m no historian but it seems to me, as someone who has strayed (badly but gladly) from my born-again Christian beginnings, that many of today’s believers have turned the Reformation on its head in a way. Whole lifetimes can pass by without having to think seriously about what a good person is or how to put virtue into action—why, when, and how. And such apathy is made possible by the deep-seated belief that morality is the same as obedience to authority, especially obedience to God the Father. In other words, I am good because people in authority tell me I am good for obeying their authority. Take the believer out of the shadow of authority, however, and what do you have? A person who’s never developed a moral core. An empty vessel, sadly. Donald Trump and his white evangelical supporters have more in common than most people think. (Caveat: I developed a moral core, but it wasn’t easy on my own. Others often do the same.)

You’ve probably read recently about evangelical Christian leaders taking umbrage with Trump’s order to pull out of Syria, abandoning our allies, the Kurds, who have protected the small Christian communities in the region—communities now in peril. This, we are told, has forced leading evangelicals to “break ranks” with Trump. Broadcaster Pat Robertson even worried that with this decision Trump might have lost “heaven’s mandate.”

But seriously. If Robertson and others wanted to take action, they would. If the lives of these Middle Eastern Christians mattered so much to them, they’d do everything in their power, which is a lot, to pressure Trump to reverse his terrible choice. They will not, however, for three reasons. 

One, these Middle Eastern Chistians are the wrong kind. They may as well be Mormons. Two, Trump is the best chance evangelicals have of establishing a social order of their making. And three, but most importantly, moral action—that is, doing good in the world—isn’t all that important in a fallen world that is coming to an end soon enough anyway. What matters is faith alone. (To be sure, there are many thoughtful evangelical Christians eager to engage morally in the world, however fallen. They are, alas, a tiny minority.) But don’t take my word for it. According to the New York Times, megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress made the very same point:

“Some evangelicals may disagree with the president’s decision,” Mr. Jeffress said, “but I guarantee you there is not one evangelical supporter of the president who would switch their vote and support Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden over a Syria decision.” 

In Martin Luther’s time, good works had become hopelessly corrupt. In ours, faith alone can be. Indeed, today’s true believers are turning the Reformation on its head. What’s moral about obedience to an authority with no moral core?

I Know It's Really U.S. Cultural Imperialism, But I Like ItDorf on Law / by Neil H. Buchana

I Know It's Really U.S. Cultural Imperialism, But I Like It

Dorf on Law / by Neil H. Buchanan / 12d

by Neil H. Buchanan

I suppose that, in early 1933, there must have been intellectuals scattered about the world thinking about relatively lightweight topics like popular music.  They surely knew that important things were afoot politically, especially in Germany, but they likely had no idea that the Reichstag fire was imminent.  Today, at least we have reason to know that something like that is all too possible.

Wikipedia helpfully explains that "[t]he term 'Reichstag fire' has come to refer to false flagactions facilitated by an authority to promote their own interests through popular approval of retribution or retraction of civil rights."  Today, as Donald Trump's political nightmare deepens and he becomes increasingly untethered to even his abnormal version of normal day-to-day behavior, it seems more than reasonable to wonder what extreme and desperate measures he will take to save himself.

Groups of his supporters -- possibly even including some in Congress, but certainly some among the people on whom he is counting to take to the streets to save his presidency -- are surely also thinking along such lines.  One reason that it has not happened thus far is that Trump has seemed relatively untouchable, with the Mueller report inexplicably having had virtually no impact and Senate Republicans solidly behind him, no matter what he has done.

I write today gripped by a grim near-certainty that something truly catastrophic is in our future.  The reasons that we might be optimistic that people would not do this -- basic human decency, a sense of limits, worry about being found out -- seem naive at best when applied to Trump and his cultists.  Unlike the people in 1933, most of whom presumably did not yet have reason to believe that the rising nationalists in Berlin were capable of doing anything so horrible, we are reduced today to the choice between facing this reality or living in denial.  But other than sheer hope, there is little reason for anything but pessimism.

What to do?  Like those people whom I imagined living their lives back in 1933, I am going to think about popular music!  Why?  Because it is better than worrying about something over which we have no control and which is likely to fundamentally change the future.  Why not sing and dance instead?

OK, so that is a rather neck-snapping change of direction, after an outright morbid beginning to this column.  But there you have it.  This column, then, is motivated by some recent thoughts about the continuing and profound influence of Rock'n'Roll music, more than sixty years after its birth.

Because I am once again traveling around the UK and have only been in a position to eat out, my daily existence has involved a steady diet of pub food and restaurant fare.  Fortunately, as I noted a few months back, vegan fare has become almost universally available in major cities in the UK and similarly wealthy countries, which means that I am actually eating rather well.

My interest here in writing about music is based on my observations about the kind of music that is playing in the background at almost every pub and restaurant that I have visited.

What in the U.S would be called Classic Rock and early New Wave music is ubiquitous in British public houses.  One can sit for hours and hear a steady stream of Derek and the Dominoes, Cream, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, Queen, Buffalo Springfield, Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, and on and on, as well as hits continuing into the 1970's and early 1980's.

To be clear, I am not falling victim to a fallacy of self-selection.  That is, even though I'm an older middle-aged white guy from the United States who grew up on this stuff, I am not choosing my eateries on any basis that would suggest that the music fare is targeted at people like me.  Indeed, because I have spent most of my time in university towns, I have frequented places that skew very young.

I do know -- because my 20-something daughter keeps me up to date -- that there are plenty of excellent 21st Century musical acts (Florence + the Machine, Halsey, Walk the Moon, to name a few) and that young people justifiably love them.  Even so, I have been amazed by the apparent popularity of songs here that all but define my youth.

And as I have thought about it, my attitude has changed from an initial regret about American (and Baby Boomer) cultural imperialism to a more gut-level (and honest) reaction: Hell yeah, this stuff is still being played everywhere, because it's fantastic!  If you are a person who can listen to any of The Who's best songs, or Stevie Wonder's funk work (leaving aside his treacly pop), and not feel thrilled, then I can only say that although there is no accounting for taste, I feel lucky to have my tastes.

As an aside, it is important to note that my emphasis on the Americanness of all of this does not betray a lack of awareness on my part that many of the bands mentioned here are British.  Heck, the reference in the title of this column is to a Rolling Stones song, not the Beach Boys (whose best work is also iconic, of course).  Earlier this year in Cambridge, I was amused when I was giving a talk in a restaurant and noticed that the sound track was all Beatles.  (Appropriately, "Tax Man" came on just as I began to speak.  Also unplanned.)

So yes, roughly half of what I am enjoying as I travel around the UK is "local" music.  It is so local, in fact, that I almost cannot turn around without seeing something that reminds me of a song.  As I was going down to London from Cambridge, Joe Jackson's "Down to London" was stuck in my head and was then replaced by The Clash's "London's Burning."  I needed something to get Gerry Rafferty's song out of my head after my subway train stopped at the Baker Street Underground station, and luckily I was soon in Knightsbridge and thinking about Elvis Costello's wonderful "Man Out of Time."

Obviously, then, I am not denying that this soundtrack of my life is in large part the work of non-American musicians, dominated by Brits.  It simply remains true, however, that the British Invasion and everything that it set in motion was brought to us by bands who were building on American blues, soul, and so on.  The Beatles (who were covering American hits in German bars before making it big) and the Rolling Stones were enthralled by Chuck Berry and other American musical geniuses — and rightly so.  Even as far into their stardom as 1972, the Stones's "Exile on Main Street" fairly aches with admiration for American musical styles.  ("Tumbling Dice," "Sweet Black Angel," and "Shine a Light" stand out.)

Interestingly, the one exception to my run of pubs/restaurants playing Classic Rock and early New Wave music was a whisky bar (The Doors alert!) in Oxford.  What were they playing instead?  American songs from the 1930's, including show tunes and swing music.  The music feed at the bar included apparently English singers covering songs like "Night and Day" (by Indiana's own Cole Porter).  USA!  USA! USA!!

As a default assumption, I view such cultural domination to be regrettable.  Despite the unpleasant attitude that many French cultural critics adopted in condemning American cultural imperialism in the 1970's and 1980's, I always thought that they had a point.  I still do, of course.  I will not get into the distorting effects of Hollywood movies on film culture beyond simply mentioning them here to acknowledge the reality.

Even so -- and again, because my generally grim outlook these days is causing me to try to find something that makes me feel ... what is that word? ... happy -- there are times when I am willing to say that the dominant culture is simply good.  Fun.  Even the product of genius, in some cases.

That is not to say that I know it to be better than what would have existed in a different reality, nor does it say that the winners were determined in a fair competition.  (Record executives are not exactly renowned for giving all comers an even break.)  I daresay that I would bet on our timeline in a competition against others, but that is purely conjecture on my part.  And it surely reflects the fact that my tastes were formed by listening to these songs throughout my life.

But again, sometimes it is important to let loose and enjoy life when joy is there to be had.  The odds, sadly, are that the future will be bleak.  For now, I am going to crank up The Kinks and have some fun.

Not Even the Police Union Could Save Amber GuygerThe New Republic

Not Even the Police Union Could Save Amber Guyger

The New Republic / by Melissa Gira Grant / 17d

Last September, one of Amber Guyger’s friends told her that she should adopt a German Shepherd—although the dog “may be racist,” the friend texted. “It’s okay.. I’m the same,” Guyger replied.

Two days later, coming home from work and still in her Dallas police officer uniform, Guyger entered what she says she thought was her own apartment. Upon seeing a black man inside, she shot him twice—thinking he was an intruder, she later said. Botham Jean was 26. He was killed in his own apartment—one floor above Guyger’s. As she entered, he was seated on his couch, a bowl of vanilla ice cream on the ottoman.

This week, a Dallas jury convicted Amber Guyger of murder. On Wednesday, she was sentenced to ten years in prison, eligible for parole in five. While the sentence is conspicuously short, she now joins a very small but growing number of law enforcement officers who have faced any criminal charges for shooting and killing a civilian. Some racial justice advocates and legal experts hope Guyger’s conviction could signal a shift in how the police are policed.

Between 1973 and 2016, no Dallas police officer faced murder charges for killing a civilian. Starting in 2014, grand juries began handing down indictments to police who killed, but for lesser charges. It was not until the case of former Farmers Branch police officer Ken Johnson, who shot and killed 16-year-old Jose Cruz in March 2016, that an officer in Dallas was charged with murder.

Like Guyger, Johnson was off-duty at the time of the shooting. He was convicted 
in 2018, as was former Balch Springs police officer Roy Oliver for shooting and killingfifteen-year-old Jordan Edwards. Farmers Branch officer Michael Dunn was charged with murder this June, and remains on administrative leave while awaiting trial for shooting and killing 35-year-old Juan Moreno. Moreno’s family and supporters in the community occupied the Farmers Branch police station until the mayor agreed to meet with them.

Guyger, then, is only the third officer Dallas juries have convicted for murder in more than forty years.

Law enforcement officers in the United States killed more than 1100 people in 2018, according to the Mapping Police Violence Project. 25 percent of those killed were black, despite black people making up only 13 percent of the population. Unlike the murder of Botham Jean, many of these victims’ stories will never be heard by a jury at trial.

Philip Stinson, who runs the Police Integrity Research Group at Bowling Green State University, helped create one of the first national databases tracking police violence. According to his research, of the 900 to 1,000 police shootings per year, fewer than eight, on average, result in indictments. Since 2005, he has counted only three officers who were convicted of intentional murder and had the conviction stand—prior to the Guyger case.

The odds are clearly stacked against police violence accountability, then. It starts at the scene of the crime.

Shortly after police arrived at Botham Jean’s apartment that night in 2018 and attempted to revive him, they were joined by the head of the Dallas police union. By then, Guyger had been escorted away from the scene and placed in a police vehicle. As captured on body cam video, Dallas Police Association President Michael Mata asked another officer to turn off the dash cam which could record his conversation with Guyger.

“Why am I thanking Mike Mata?” activist Changa Higgins said at a protest last week. “Because, basically, during this case, he exposed what we’ve been saying about his ass all along. The DPA has too much power in policing in this city.”

Prosecutors wanted to make the point that not only was Guyger being treated differently because she was a police officer, but that Mata had asked another officer to go outside of policy—by requesting the camera be turned off—in order to give her this special treatment. Police union officials commonly get preferred access to officers who kill, across the country. They get to hear their stories before they make formal statements. They also get to help shape those stories.

Police unions exert pressure on policymakers, too, opposing and obstructing transparency efforts, and thereby maintaining control of what the public knows about police violence. When California enacted a law this year requiring police departments to share misconduct records, police slow-walked requests, and then still withheld documents.

Now, the Long Beach police union has proposednew contract language stipulating officers be informed when records pertaining to them are requested, and to be given five days to review the records before they are released. The new policy would also require that the name and organization of the person who requested misconduct records be disclosed to that officer. Legal experts fear these kinds of proposals will proliferate throughout the state, discouraging people from seeking misconduct records.

This is a national problem. More than 100 newsrooms across the country spent over a year in 2018 and 2019 trying to collect police misconduct records in a nationwide project coordinated by USA TODAY. “Dozens of police agencies ignored repeated requests made under states’ open records laws,” they found. “Other agencies denied requests, saying sharing the information with the public violates officers’ privacy rights or is not in the public’s best interest… In state after state, USA TODAY had to employ the assistance of its lawyers to gain access to the public records.” In the end, these reporters found at least 200,000 instances of alleged misconduct, and more than 30,000 officers who had been decertified by state oversight agencies.

When police unions act in order to protect a co-worker, that can put them at odds with protecting public safety and civil rights. It has also put them at odds with those in police leadership who want to better serve the public interest. In Phoenix, when a police chief pushed back on the city’s disciplinary review board for routinely overturning his recommendations to discipline officers, the police unions organized a no-confidence vote in him. After the chief held a news conference criticizing the union in 2014, the city fired the him. Internal attempts at accountability can end in punishment, perhaps more often than does the misconduct itself—although measuring that for certain would require access to the records police departments so often withhold.

Police killing cases that make it to trial, then, traverse an obstacle course which favors police: the union, the internal investigation, the secrecy. A prosecutor who routinely works with police to make criminal cases has to now make a case that compels a grand jury to indict a police officer—in proceedings themselves which are unknown until their conclusion, if at all. If a grand jury recommends an indictment—and “if the prosecutor wants an indictment she or he is probably going to get one because they do have so much control over the grand jury,” as law professor Andrew Leipold told the New York Times—then the prosecutor can charge the officer, and then, finally, there’s the trial itself.

With the Guyger case, it ultimately depended on the jury in her criminal trial. In the end, they weren’t permitted to watch the video of Guyger and her union president trying to get her to talk without being recorded. Maybe it didn’t matter. It could already have been clear to them that Guyger got special treatment. The members of this jury might also have been more aware of the problem than others have been—seven were black, five were non-black people of color, and four were white. In the end, they did something that should be routine: they returned a verdict holding a police officer to the same standard they might hold a civilian who shot and killed someone on sight.

The Far Right’s Apocalyptic Literary CanonThe New Republic / by Ian Allen

The Far Right’s Apocalyptic Literary Canon

The New Republic / by Ian Allen / 19d

As tensions in Washington ratchet toward the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump, dark matters are suddenly part of the discussion. “If the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office,” Rev. Robert Jeffress told the gang at Fox & Friends Weekend on Sunday, “I’m afraid it will cause a civil war-like fracture from which our country will never heal.” Trump posted the comments to his Twitter feed overnight, and Washington reacted immediately to the ominous invocation of civil war in the United States.  

Some very frightening folks on the radical right reacted as well. The Oath Keepers, one of the largest antigovernment militias in the country—claiming tens of thousands of present and former law enforcement officials and military veterans among its members—doubled down on the president’s admonition, tweeting: “The term ‘civil war’ is increasingly on people’s tongues. And not just ‘cold civil war’—full-blown ‘hot’ civil war. Fact is patriots consider the left to be domestic enemies of the constitution bent on the destruction of the Republic.” 

So-called serious people may consider this kind of assertion to be extreme, even crazy. It’s neither. As impeachment proceedings gain speed, Trump is getting backed into a corner, and Trump gets aggressive when cornered. He’s already prepping his followers for a wider “us” versus “them” conflict, tweeting last weekend: “They are trying to stop ME, because I am fighting for YOU.” 

With Republicans in control of the Senate, it remains unlikely that the president will be forced from office by anything besides an electoral defeat next year. It’s doubtful he’ll go away quietly in any event. Trump’s now-jailed former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, concluded his testimony to Congress earlier this year with a warning: “I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also publicly aired concerns that the president might contest a close election, telling the The New York Times, “If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election. We have to prepare for that.”  

You know who is prepared for that? Lone wolves, domestic terrorists, white supremacists, and militiamen on the far-right fringes who have long trafficked in an expansive body of published manifestos and propagandist fiction. Theirs is a kind of sick pop culture, constantly updated and running parallel to the mainstream, that fully accounts for apocalyptic race wars and nationalist-driven coups d’etat. Those steeped in this body of literature are primed to expect the moment where their rhetorical “shit” hits the real-life “fan.” Many hope this will happen in their lifetimes. Many others expect to participate in this great reckoning when it does. It’s all written down in the stories they tell one another.

If and when this moment arrives, those who have drunk heavily from this subculture will be expecting to take their cues from Trump. He has done his part in raising these expectations, having repeatedly and bluntly floated the idea of extending his time in office beyond the constitutionally mandated term limits. He once posed this question to his Twitter followers: “Do you think the people would demand that I stay longer?” More recently, he posted a fake campaign meme: “Trump 2024, Keep America Great.” And back before he even took office, candidate Trump was flatly asked whether he would accept the election results, should he be defeated in a close race. He refused to answer, instead snarking, “I’ll tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”

The suspense is killing us. Cesar Sayoc, the “#MAGABomber,” name-checked Trump and his ideologies in a written manifesto. The El Paso shooter did as well, but added the caveat: “My opinions…predate Trump and his campaign for president.” The words of these men have been effectively inducted into the literary canon of the far right, for future extremists to cite as inspiration for their own actions. This sinister virtual lending library contains more than just a bunch of loose-limbed screeds. In fact, they quite neatly mirror mainstream literature in its mix of highbrow and pulp, as well as its range of subgenres: earnest historical novels, dystopian sci-fi fantasies, broad comic farces, and more. Some of it is well written, most is not. Over the years, these books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, primarily via person-to-person sales online or at gun shows. It’s a world that most people—“normies,” as they call us—know very little about, but it’s as expansive and varied as the average person’s reading list. These books are proven fodder for terrorist attacks and, in this American moment, they portend a dangerous confrontation.

The premier classic of the genre is The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by William Pierce, founder of the white supremacist National Alliance. It is the fictitious diary of Earl Turner, an everyman soldier for a secretive organization of racist insurrectionaries, called the Organization, which successfully hijacks a nuclear arsenal and leverages those weapons to incite a race war and eventually overthrow the U.S. government. The book has inspired hundreds of attacks worldwide, including a gruesome series of murders in the eighties. Most famously, police discovered pages torn from The Turner Diaries in a baggie in Timothy McVeigh’s car at the time of his arrest for the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City.

The next-best-known book is probably Jean Raspail’s 1973 anti-immigrant fantasy novel, The Camp of the Saints, which depicts the invasion and eventual destruction of white European culture by hordes of brown-skinned immigrants. It begins with a surreal depiction of a mob of Indian mothers swarming the gates of a European embassy, desperately pressing their children through the bars, and onto the good graces of white society. The Camp of the Saints, notably, has its hooks in the White House. Julia Hahn, special assistant to the president, who works on immigration policy with Steve Bannon protégé Steven Miller, once delivered a glowing essay about Raspail’s novel—a love song really—to Breitbart News. Bannon himself regularly mentions to the book in discussions of immigration. To anyone familiar with the paranoia-fueled xenophobia of The Camp of the Saints, it is not surprising to learn that a White House staffed by devotees of the book would commit themselves to corralling migrant children into pens. The book informs this policy; it did not happen by accident.

Politico has reported recent discussions among White House staff of a self-published, rambling essay called Bronze Age Mindset. The book is a dizzying 198-page treatise, written under the pseudonym of “Bronze Age Pervert”—shorthanded to “BAP” by his ardent fans. And they are legion. It’s a smash hit with the right, and is currently ranked #3 on Amazon’s bestseller list in Ancient Greek History, and #174 in Humor—an inarguably more competitive category.

The author’s Twitter presence is a post-post-post-ironic blend of jokey homoerotic photos of bodybuilders and boorish far-right memes. But while BAP’s prose is rather artfully penned, Bronze Age Mindset’s arguments are fractured and incoherent. Imagine the opinions of Jordan B. Peterson, as expressed by Ayn Rand’s Superman, in the playful vernacular of Donald Barthelme. The essay nevertheless manages to exert a sneaky power on the reader, despite being so chopped and screwed. BAP’s introduction to the book is an incantation of sorts, the haunting final sentence of which ends without a terminal period; a detail that is unlikely to have been omitted by mistake:

I want to prepare you to receive this old spirit—old spirits are moving from behind the reeds... the silhouette shimmers against a river in late summer, and I see already men who know how to honor such uncanny old friends. May they inhabit us again and give us strength to purify this world of refuse

The far-right literary oeuvre provides ample opportunities for such spirits to be conjured. In the years since Trump’s election, one particular work—Gerald James McManus’s 2001 political thriller Dark Millennium: A Visionary Tale—has felt eerily prescient. Its protagonist, U.S. President Alexander McGrail, is presented as both a hero and a beloved villain. He’s a narcissistic sociopath and a racist. He treats women badly. He betrays trusted allies. As the story progresses, he enlists a top military officer, General Brandt, to help him put a diabolical secret plan into action: together they fake a terrorist attack that kills every Democrat in Congress. McGrail blames Muslim extremists for the tragedy, but the press doesn’t buy his explanation. Their offices are thus raided and the media is eventually shut down completely. Then, as is the case in many of these authors’ fantasy scenarios, things spiral into race war.

Incited by the media’s accusations against the president, America’s black ghettos ran red with blood and flame. Uprisings broke out first in the eastern cities. ... In Manhattan, Brandt oversaw the execution of thirty thousand captured blacks. They were dragged kicking and screaming to the edge of a huge pit that was dug out of Central Park. Some blacks demanded their rights, most begged for mercy, but they were all thrown into the pit and remorselessly machine-gunned by Brandt’s men.

The violence spreads throughout the country as McGrail’s America systematically murders all people of color, feminists, socialists, and, of course, Jews. The story ends years into a future wherein McManus’s fictional leader is, despite his personal flaws, venerated as the hero–founder of a pure and enduring whites-only ethno-utopia.

The point is not to say that the harrowing plot of Dark Millennium is about to come true. It is, rather, to acknowledge that there exists a broad, far-right subculture, which is actively posting, plotting, and praying that it will. Charlottesville was an attempt to galvanize this very movement. Its organizers sought to “Unite the Right,” and bring together the various outlier factions—men’s groups, paleo-libertarians, “sovereign citizens,” and the like—that constitute the nebulous “Alt Right” and “Alt Light.” Instead, things quickly devolved into hooliganism, as the same old clowns rolled up, united only by the same old hatreds of the same old groups that have been targeted for decades, as codified in books like The Turner Diaries, The Camp of the Saints, and Dark Millennium: people of color, feminists, socialists, and Jews. 

Despite this movement’s failure in Virginia, the right has since become increasingly unified online, emboldened by evidence of their influence on Trump, and a mounting sense that they are gearing up for something big. The neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer recently featured a homepage header image of cartoon machine guns circling the Constitution. The site’s publisher, Andrew Anglin, posts multiple times daily, revving up his followers, and has called for a soon-to-come “age of ultraviolence,” followed by a forceful solicitation of compliance with leadership:

There will be leaders. You need to be prepared to recognize them for who they are, and you need to be prepared to do whatever they tell you to do, exactly as they tell you to do it. You are going to be required to do things that you cannot possibly imagine yourself doing right now. And if you do not do these things, you will die.

If Donald Trump loses the presidency next fall, we all know he’ll tweet up a storm on election night—railing against the corrupt media, decrying rigged elections, shrieking about socialism. But…then what? What if he takes it to the next level and calls for violence or declares martial law? One hopes that those to whom we entrust the power of state violence—cops, soldiers, spies—would keep the oaths of a Constitutional order. Or, might they instead take us down a new path; a darker one, snaking though clearings felled by norm-breakers like Mitch McConnell and Devin Nunes: hearkening to the paeans to the “great replacement” of Tucker Carlson, the fragmented agitations of BAP, or the fascist violence of Andrew Anglin? All of these folktales could quickly come into competition, with the winner determining whether or not a Trumpian crie de guerre will accomplish what Charlottesville could not: calling the lone wolves to the hunt, bolstered by a newly-unified army of Bronze Age Mindset’s “uncanny old friends.” 

What if the next Democratic debate kicked off with this question from the moderators: “Senator Warren, let’s say you win the election in a narrow victory. Rather than concede, President Donald Trump goes on live television and whips his crowd into a frenzy, exclaiming, ‘They’re trying to steal the presidency from us! The time is now! Rise up and fight!’ How would you, as President-Elect, respond?” 

The Beltway set may yet believe this question to be crazy. But in Trump’s America—where Greenland is for sale, weather is changed with the swish of a Sharpie, and tanks roll down Pennsylvania Avenue on July Fourth—they should know that crazy people are seriously contemplating these questions, and looking to the books they’ve spent a lifetime reading and sharing for prophecy, if not instructions. We so-called normies must be prepared to answer.