Donald Trump's Russia Policy

So, let me be a little charitable to Donald Trump for a change.  I don't know whether his pro-Russia policy will be successful.  I don't know whether Rex Tillerson will be any good as Secretary of State. But I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.  I do not think we are altogether innocent in our deteriorated relations with Russia, and I do think a reset is in order.

For anyone who thinks Russia is an expansionist power on the march, keep some things in mind. Back during the Cold War, Russia ruled an empire known as the Soviet Union.  It was the hegemon over a large chunk of Europe, extending as far west as East Germany.  In 1989, Eastern Europe revolted, and the Russians did nothing to stop them.  Before long, all the former Warsaw Pact countries had joined the anti-Russian NATO alliance.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the states of Russia's old empire declared independence.  Three of them (Latvia, Estonia and Lithunia) actually joined NATO as well.  Now there has even been serious talk of Georgia and the Ukraine joining, bringing a hostile alliance all the way to Russia's borders.  This is not an aggressive power on the march; it is a country in retreat wanting to stop and shore up its position.  This is not unreasonable.

It is a most annoying tendency of our foreign policy establishment to assume that global hegemony is our god-given right and that any country that opposes it is simply being unreasonable.  Russia has reasonable reasons not to want a hostile alliance on its borders, in lands that it once ruled and now wants at least to dominate.

But these countries don't want to be dominated by Russia, some may object.  If they want alliance with us, why should be give Russia a veto?  Quite simply, because this is how international politics works.  When a country has nuclear weapons, it has a way on insisting that its wishes be taken into account.  To anyone who complains about our "passivity" in the face of Russian invasions of Georgia and the Ukraine, I would ask, are you prepared to go to war with a nuclear power over the desire to extent a hostile alliance all the way to its borders?  All right, then, let's start considering realistic alternatives.

During the Cold War, Finland was right along the Soviet border.  Yet it managed to preserve its domestic freedom and democracy by agreeing to submission in matters of foreign policy. "Finlandization" was widely derived as cowardice, but given the circumstances, it was the best that Finland could realistically hope for.  Sweden and Austria, though less in the Soviet line of fire, felt the need to maintain neutrality in order to protect their own domestic liberty.

Within the Warsaw Pact, Findlandization was not a realistic option.  When the people of Hungary in 1956 revolted, overthrew Communism, and attempted to leave (while agreeing to remain neutral and not joint NATO), Russia sent in tanks and crushed the rebellion by brute force.  Yet they had allowed the overthrow of one Communist government and its replacement with a milder one in Poland earlier in the same year.  And they allowed the new Hungarian government to institute reforms softening its severity.  When Poland experienced a great wave of strikes and established an independent union in 1980, the Soviets allowed considerable expansion of freedom, and required the government to declare martial law only when the people started calling for free elections which would, of course, have meant the end of Communism.  The lesson was clear.  Once a country became Communist and was taken into the Warsaw Pact, Findlanization was not an option.  Neither the overthrow of Communism nor withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact would be tolerated.  But the Soviets would allow some relaxation of the severity of Communism and limited freedom within their rigid framework.*

The case of Hungary was particularly tragic.  Naive Hungarians looked to us to rescue them, never understanding that rescue was out of the question, given that the Russians had nukes.  When John Foster Dulles declared that we were exchanging a policy of containment for one of "liberation," many Hungarians were foolish enough to take him at his word.  They revolted in the belief that we would come to their rescue and were savagely crushed because such a rescue was never in the cards. Certainly we were right not to intervene.  Horrible as the invasion was, Hungary would hardly have been better off as a mushroom cloud.  But it was a mistake to encourage the Hungarians to think that we would ever come to their rescue.  They would have been much better off understanding that they were stuck in the Soviet orbit for the foreseeable future and that their best option was too see how much autonomy they could negotiate with the Soviets.  But wouldn't it have been foolish to come right out and publicly proclaim that we were going to leave the Hungarians to their fate?  Maybe so. But there are quiet diplomatic channels for conveying the same information to would-be anti-Communist leaders.

Likewise, if we can't say so publicly, we should be privately making very clear to the political class in Georgia and the Ukraine that Russia has nukes, and that we will make our policy taking this fact into account.  We do these countries no favor by encouraging them to confront the Russians counting on our support that we are not going to give.  Nor do we do them any favor by putting them at risk of ending up as a mushroom cloud -- or even a battlefield between the great powers.  Findlandization is the best that any country on the Russian border can hope for, and the sooner they understand that and make the best bargain they can, the better.

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*Although the Soviets did send in their army to suppress a milder form of Communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Donald Trump's Flying Circus, 12/19/16

So, basically, everyone agrees that the Russians were behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee server.  All 17 of our intelligence agencies agree.  At least two private security firms agree.  They have released enough information to the public to make their reasoning understandable. Hell, even Donald Trump's surrogates appear to agree.  There is room for disagreement on Russian motives, but not on who is behind the hack.  Yet Donald Trump refuses to recognize it.

I see two possibilities.  One:  He can't accept it.  He simply rejects all evidence contrary to his preconceptions.  Needless to say, this is an extremely dangerous trait in a President.  Bush and Cheney were notoriously determined to have Saddam Hussein involved in 9-11 to give us an excuse to invade Iraq.  They spent a lot of time trying to chase down a non-existent meeting between Al-Qaeda and Iraqi operatives in Prague.  But in the end, unable to find the evidence they wanted, they limited themselves to insinuating at such a link and giving speeches that implied it without quite saying so.  This allowed them to deny making such a link when called on it.  It never occurred to Bush or Cheney just to send out a non-stop stream of blatant lies saying that there was such a link in the absence of all evidence.  This degree of reality denial is unpresidented unprecedented.  (I expect to be using that/those word(s) a lot).

The other alternative is that he knows perfectly well that the Russians are behind the hack.  He is just lying through his teeth about it.  Let's hope that he is knowingly lying.  At least we can hope then that he can at least tell reality from delusion and won't act on delusion.

In further news, Trump's sons are auctioning off visits to our new President or hunting trips with his sons for million dollar donations to their foundation.  Newt Gingrich is proposing that he deal with any conflicts of interest by preemptively pardoning any offenders.  The Kuwaiti government has been pressured to send its delegates to the Trump Hotel instead of the Four Seasons.  And he will have his own Praetorian Guard of private bodyguards in addition to the Secret Service.

But let's focus on what is important.  At least he never sent State Department e-mails on a private server.  (I am going to have to end every Flying Circus post with that).

PS:  I love this post by David Frum in which he explains why so many Jews (and non-Jews) disliked Sarah Palin.  In particular:

Jews do think that knowledge is important to a president. They do think a president should be able to think clearly and to distinguish between true information and wishful delusions. I feel sure most Americans of all faiths would agree. Does Jennifer Rubin seriously suggest that this opinion is mistaken?

If the Trump election has made anything clear, it is that large numbers of people are opposed to thinking clearly and distinguishing between true information and wishful delusions.  Thinking clearly and distinguishing between true information and wishful delusions are the marks of elitism.  We want a President who refrains from any thought at all and ignores information in favor of wishful delusions.

Richard II, Donald Trump, and the Electoral College

Richard II

Shakespeare's play Richard II is about what in Shakespeare's day would have been an impossible dilemma -- what if the lawful and legitimate king is utterly unfit for the job?  No one doubts that Richard II is the lawful king.  Yet he had bankrupted England with his extravagance, connived in the murder of his uncle, seized another uncle's estate to enrich himself, and banished his cousin to prevent him from challenging this action.  I belong to a Shakespeare discussion group in which it was explained why seizing the uncle's estate was a very serious matter.  It means that property is merely held at the king's whim instead of by law.  All the great lords turn against the king for fear of being next in line.  And it is not just the great lords who are affected.  Medieval society was based on a whole series of oaths of fealty between superior and inferior.  In seizing his uncle's estate, Richard has foisted a new lord on all his subordinates and thrown all their orderly ties, rights, and obligations into upheaval.  In short, he is abandoning the rule of law for the rule of caprice.

I first saw the play as a teen when the BBC was putting on a whole series of Shakespeare plays.  It was revealing to me in showing what was meant by the divine rights of kings.  Up till then, I had thought of it as the divine rights of kingship as an institution, or of a particular royal family.  But it never occurred to me that it meant the divine right of a particular individual to be king, which God would uphold against all others, even his royal cousin.  At the same time, I did not believe in the divine rights of kings, and I was young and foolish, with romantic notions that revolutions could fix everything.  The dilemma was not one that I could relate to.

I belong to a Shakespeare reading and discussion group that read Richard II last year in the spring, and this time I looked for a way to relate to the message.  And what I came up with was this.  Having the king's oldest son always succeed him is not a very good system.*  But it was the best system anyone had come up with in Shakespeare's day.  One need only compare England, where the king was always succeeded by his oldest son, the ruler had undisputed legitimacy, and succession was orderly and uncontested, with Turkey, where there was no established rule.  When the Sultan died, his successor was whichever son killed all of his brothers.  If the country was lucky, one of them would move fast and the carnage would be limited to the palace, while everyone else could carry on about their lives.  If the country was unlucky, no one would be fast enough, in which case all the rivals would raise their own armies and civil war would ensue.  To overthrow a legitimate king, no matter how bad, was to overthrow the system of orderly succession, undermine legitimate rule, throw the door open to future usurpation, and invite the Turkish system of succession by war and murder.  In short, it becomes an impossible dilemma when the king is undermining the rule of law, yet to overthrow him is to overthrow the rule of law in the form of orderly succession.

I laid this out on Facebook, and my sister commented:

We don't believe in the divine right but we face similar problems, such as "what if those who choose to run for elected office are selected for by their ability to gather funds or to rile up groups, rather than for their sound beliefs and ability to get them done". There is still no very satisfactory answer.

Well, now we are reading Richard II again (in more detail) and it resonates as never before.  The US has elected a man who I consider a real danger to the rule of law, who lost the popular vote, and who appears to have gotten an assist from an unfriendly foreign power (though without direct complicity on his part).  Yet under the rules of the Electoral College, there is no doubt that his election is lawful. Now there are people attempting to manipulate electors into denying in what is his right by law, though not the will of the people.  Republican Electors have been bombarded with hate mail, harassing phone calls, and even death threats.

Look, I stand second to none in my hatred of Trump.  But these attempts to deny the results of the election, though technically legal (except for the harassment, threats, etc, of course) are out of bounds for a loyal opposition.  Loyal opposition means "acceptance of electoral outcomes in exchange for a chance to regularly compete for political office within formally defined timeframes and under universally competitive rules and conditions."  Trying to persuade the electors to go against their lawful roles and to deliver the election to someone other than the lawful victor is just that.  Yes, I agree that a Trump Presidency threatens to be disastrous.  Yes, I agree, the system is flawed if it allows a candidate to win a comfortable margin in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by about 2%.  Yes, I agree, it is hypocritical of Trump supporters to be so outraged that Clinton supporters are questioning the outcome of the election when they so often threatened to do just that if Trump lost.  Yes, I agree that Russian meddling in the election is troubling and our allowing Russian meddling is a good deal worse.  But Trump is still the winner by all accepted laws and norms.  To attempt to deny him victory would set off an unprecedented constitutional crisis.  A Trump presidency is merely a probable disaster; to seek to overturn the election is a certain disaster.

And yes, I also agree that the Republicans have spent eight years trying to delegitimize the Obama presidency, just as they tried to delegitimize the Bill Clinton presidency before, and promised to delegitimize the Hillary Clinton presidency if she had won.  And yes, Republicans have violated norm after norm, from abuse of impeachment proceedings, to making the filibuster a routine instrument of legislation, to refusing to confirm any Supreme Court Justice appointed by a Democrat to threatening to default on the national debt unless their program, rejected by voters at the polls, is enacted.  But they have never gone so far as to openly seek to overturn the result of a lawful election for President.

And please consider, anyone who wants to break this norm, what sort of precedent it would set for Republicans the next time they lose.

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*We got a look at just how bad a system it can be in Henry VI, when the king died young and his only son was a nine-month-old baby.  Needless to say, having a baby for king caused serious problems.

The Electoral College

With the Electoral College vote coming up, there has been a lot of debate about why we have an Electoral College instead of direct popular election.  Some say it is because the Founding Fathers distrusted the common people and wanted to put a buffer between them and election of the President. Others say it was to prevent the rise of populist demagogues, or to protect slave states.  My history of law professor saw it as something far more innocent -- the unfamiliarity of the whole practice of tabulating votes over a wide area.

Yet reading over James Madison's Notes on the Constitutional Convention, it becomes clear that none of these are the true reason.  Rather, no one anticipated that there would be nation-wide political parties to choose rival candidates.  Indeed, political parties were seen as corrupt at best, and sinister conspiracies at worst.  Instead, it was assumed that after George Washington, there would not be any candidates of national prominence.  Instead, the voters of each state (whether by electoral or popular vote) would choose the most eminent person from their own state.

The alternative was general seen as election by Congress. This was generally feared because Congress was a standing body, known in advance, and meeting in a single place.  All these things were seen as carrying the risk of conspiracy, intrigue, corruption, and foreign meddling.  It also destroyed the independence of the executive and made him subordinate to the legislature.
The system set forth originally was intended to cope with these anticipated problems:

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote.

The Electoral College allowed each state to make its choice clear -- clearer than an attempt to aggregate all the votes from all the states. By having the Electors chosen solely to choose a President and meet separately each in their own state, the system reduced the likelihood of conspiracy or corruption. Requiring each Elector to choose a second candidate from outside of the state, they gave an opportunity for a candidate of national prominence to win. Having Congress choose from among the top five candidates rested on the assumption that each state would have a different winner. Congress would choose the winner from the five largest states.  Having the House, rather than the Senate, vote if there was no majority removed objections to the "aristocratic" nature of the Senate, yet having it vote by states gave small states the same weight they would have in the Senate.  

And, it should be noted, this system was not controversial at the time. Indeed, in Federalist Paper No. 68, Hamilton commented:

THE mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. The most plausible of these, who has appeared in print, has even deigned to admit that the election of the President is pretty well guarded. 

Yet it became apparent as soon as the very first election that the system for dealing with a deadlock in the Electoral College was seriously flawed. As originally written, whoever each elector was required to vote for two candidates, at least one of whom was not from his own state. Whoever won the most votes would be the President and the runner-up would become Vice President. It became clear with the very first election,even though everyone knew that George Washington would be unanimously elected, that if the Electors all voted for the same candidate for Vice-President, there would be no legal distinction as to which was which. By the time John Adams ran for President, candidates were beginning to run in pairs, with one as candidate for President and one for Vice President. But electors often split their tickets, with the result that Adams was elected President and his rival, Jefferson, became Vice President. Adams' administration was continually hampered by having his leading rival as embedded in his government and impossible to remove.

In turn, when Jefferson was elected, there was no ticket splitting, and the team of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr won. But there was no official rule as to which of them was President and which was Vice President. Even though everyone knew Jefferson was supposed to be President and Burr Vice President, officially they were declared a tie and the House went until February, with 36 ballots and all manner of intrigue before finally voting in favor of Jefferson. After this the Twelfth Amendment was enacted, arranging for the President and Vice President to run as a pair, with clear rules as to which was which. The House continued to vote by states.

This procedure has been used only once since, in the 1824 election, when the Electoral College split among four candidates. Although Andrew Jackson won the most electoral and popular votes, Henry Clay (then Speaker of the House) swung the House in favor of John Quincy Adams in exchange for being appointed his Secretary of State. Jackson and his followers were understandably outraged and went on to win the following election.  The system of breaking Electoral College deadlocks by the House of Representatives, voting by states, has proven a very bad one in the few cases that it has been used. Many believe that the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore was made out of fear that the Florida recount would continue past the deadline for the Electors to meet, with the result that the election would be thrown into the House (as it is called).  The Supreme Court acted to prevent a return of the system that had worked so badly every time before.

For further dull details, see this post on my other blog.

Trump's Flying Circus, 12/15/16

So, Vanity Fair ran a snobbish article dissing Trump Grill(e) and Trump retaliated by tweeting, "Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!"  Really, it is time to stop trying to figure out whether Trump's tweets are an attempt to distract from more serious stories or simply reflect a lack of self-discipline. Given that stories Trump would rather see buried and wild undisciplined tweets are both becoming routine occurrences, the distinction is fast becoming one without a difference.

The bad news is that my assumption that the Republican donor class would stand up to Trump over two things, being a Russian agent or infringing on the interests of big business.  Alas, publicly traded corporations appear to be the ultimate pushovers.  Trump can tank their stock with a single tweet and reduce them to submission.  (Privately held corporations, including the Koch Brothers, will presumably be made of sterner stuff).  And the whole Republican Party seems to be willing to get in bed with the Russians if it will advance their partisan interests.

The good new is that the Trump Administration does appear to be subject to pressure by people outside the Republican Establishment.  When a gunman threatened Comet Ping Pong pizzeria over a fabricated story that it was running a child trafficking operation,  Michael Flynn, Jr., son and chief of staff to paranoid National Security Michael Flynn, Sr., posted a tweet defending the story.  He was  forced out by widespread outcry.  When the incoming team running the Department of Energy called for the names of all employees working on global warming, the Department refused and the transition team backed down.  Now granted, these may be mere cosmetic changes, masking deeper activities, but in the end, it shows that Trump is not invulnerable.  This will be important to keep in mind.

Donald Trump's Flying Circus, 12/12/16

OK, let's face it.  It will probably be a rare day that Donald Trump's flying circus doesn't give me something this is hard to resist posting about.  These will be brief comments on the new normal.

Alex Jones of Infowars, who never saw a conspiracy he didn't like, has decided to make an exception when confronted with evidence of an actual conspiracy by Russian intelligence to promote Donald Trump.  Actually, Trump is going to be a problem for Alex Jones over the long run.  Alex Jones' schtick is to blame absolutely everything on the Global Conspiracy by the Illuminati, New World Order, or whatever.  Mass shootings, terrorist attacks, contagious diseases, natural disasters, eccentric weather -- all those thing we used to put down in the category of shit happens -- are now all false flags and sinister conspiracy by the New World Order.  All politicians, media outlets and other authorities could simply be dismissed as part of the conspiracy.  But in Trump, Jones now has a President who at least pretends to give his loopy conspiracy theories credence.  At last, one who is not part of the New World Order, but is prepared to fight it!

Yet, funny thing, even assuming the Trump Presidency does not lead to disaster, the usual shit will continue to happen.  There will still be mass shootings, terrorist attacks, contagious diseases, natural disasters, eccentric weather, etc.  A President prepared to fight the New World Order won't be able to stop them.  What Jones will make of that remains to be seen.  Alternately, for a paranoid look at paranoia, see here for the proposal that Alex Jones and all the rest are really just a Russian conspiracy.

In other news today, I am really starting to like Rand Paul.  He has vowed to do everything in his power to block crazed warmonger John Bolton from being Deputy Secretary of State on the grounds that he is a crazed warmonger.  “He should get nowhere close to the State Department if anybody with a sane worldview is in charge,” Paul said.  You tell 'em!

Has Jonah Goldberg Rethought "Liberal Fascism"?

Let me start with a clear statement.  Donald Trump is not a fascist.  Neither are the various right-wing populist parties arising all across Europe.  Both Trump and his European counterparts accept contested elections at the only source of government legitimacy.  They do not glorify violence for its own sake or have paramilitaries.  Their goal is not to overthrow democracy, but to make it narrower and less inclusive.  I hereby apologize for my earlier post, written at a time when Trump seemed headed for defeat and was sounding increasingly paranoic, relying more and more on his Alt Right followers.  I wondered then if he might lead the Alt Right into a fascistic third party.  That was Trump on the run and facing defeat.  Trump triumphant is promising to govern much like a conventional Republican, only anti-trade and pro-Russia.

Watching the rise in Europe of parties that resist austerity and scapegoat immigrants, I began to  reconsider my rejection of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.  And not, I certainly did not agree that fascism is left-wing or liberal.  I accepted from the start that fascism was not libertarian in its economics.  But that by itself did not make it left-wing.  What was driven home more clearly for me was that fascism was Keyesian, and the right-wing populist movements in Europe today are Keyesian, or at least anti-austerity.  In a U.S. context, that makes them center-left, just as the center-left government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barrack Obama responded to an economic downturn -- however imperfectly -- with a Keyesian stimulus.  But it isn't so simple in Europe.  In Europe, in the 1930's and today, the center-left has lined up behind anti-Keyesian calls for austerity, while right-wing populists have rejected such calls in favor of a semi-Keyesian stimulus.  Yet these European parties are seen by all, including themselves, as right-wing, as is Trump in the U.S. and his semi-fascist followers on the Alt Right.

Jonah Goldberg generally responded to Trump with entirely  appropriate horror.  But has any of this led him to question his view that fascism was a left-wing movement?  The answer appears to be no. Goldberg's basic reason for condemning Trump is that he is a closet liberal:

Trump is not a conservative. He has some instincts that overlap with conservatism — the importance of law and order, the value of military strength etc. — but these instincts are not derived from any serious attachment to ideas or arguments. They stem from his lizard-brain machismo and his authoritarian streak. He never talks about liberty or limited government unless someone shoves it into his teleprompter. His ideas about economics and public policy are shot-through with dirigisme. 

He laments that conservatives seem eager to abandon libertarianism for whatever Trump says.  But does it never occur to him that maybe there just aren't all that many libertarians out there, and that the Republican Party's appeal for a long time has been to "lizard brain machismo" and an "authoritarian streak"?  Indeed, has it never occurred to him that when he and other libertarians endorsed the policies of George W. Bush -- basically, that we have the right to invade any country we feel like and that the President can do whatever he wants (indefinite detention, "enhanced interrogation," surveillance without oversight, etc) so long as he uses the words "national security" first -- that these libertarians themselves were succumbing to "lizard brain machismo" and an "authoritarian streak" and abandoning their basic distrust of the state?

And when asked about the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it never seemed to occur to him that Trump's enthusiasm for torture was any worse than Clinton's wish to increase economic regulations.  Indeed, he considered Clinton more dangerous in the short run.  Trump he considered more dangerous in the long run, not because of any disaster that might happen, but the Republican Party ceasing to be conservative (i.e., libertarian) and instead being "protectionist, pro-authoritarian, and dirigiste" and perhaps even embracing identity politics, i.e., white identity politics, while Democrats are the party of minority identity politics.

Several things are wrong here.

For one, Goldberg seems to assume that all identity politics is the same, and that it is the sole preserve of the left.  He is wrong on both counts.  The first is particularly offensive.  In saying that the Nazis resembled today's liberals because both practiced identity politics is saying that the identity politics of affirmative action and the identity politics that leads to gas chambers are really not so different. My first impulse is to say that there is an identity politics of inclusion and an identity politics of exclusion, but Goldberg would said that that is a distinction without a difference.  He would say that any affirmative action admissions policy to include more blacks and Hispanics is simply a policy to exclude whites and Asians.  There is an identity politics of dividing up the goods by identity group instead of on individual merit, and there is an identity politics of shutting some groups out altogether.

Or in more concrete terms, consider US politics, North and South, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Both practiced identity politics.  In the North, identity politics was a spoils and patronage system.  Different groups of immigrants and ethnicities voted for politicians of their ethnic group, who brought them home a share of government jobs, services etc.  In the South, ethnic politics meant white people shutting black people out of the system altogether and denying them the right to vote, or to receive any share in government and its spoils.   Goldberg would doubtless find both systems repugnant.* But they are not morally equivalent.  One is merely a form of corruption; the other is outright oppression and denial of rights.  Today's liberal forms of identity politics are closer to the ethnic spoils system that existed among big city patronage machines than the total exclusion that prevailed in the South.  And Hitler -- well, he began with total exclusion and went WAY beyond it.

For another thing, Goldberg is quite wrong in thinking that identity politics is the exclusive preserve of the left, or that white identity politics is anything new.  Nationalism, after all, is a form of identity politics, and very much a thing of the right.  But maybe Goldberg means identity politics within domestic politics.  Well, this whole business of red state versus blue state, the Heartland versus the coastal elites, rural versus urban, Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays, Real America versus -- well, that is never quite said, is itself a form of identity politics. And if Goldberg responds that this is a less harmful form because it is not ethnic identity politics, I would say that a lot of it, but especially fulminations against "political correctness" is simply white identity politics in disguise.

And perhaps most significantly, Goldberg never seems to consider just how dangerous "lizard brain machismo" and appeals to it are.  Goldberg makes the tired old "frog in the pot" argument, that Clinton will incrementally turn up the heat, while Trump will start it at boiling.  The "frog in the pot" argument is patently false.  If the water heats up gradually the frog will, in fact, notice when it starts to get uncomfortable and jump out.  But a frog thrown in boiling water is unlikely to survive long enough to jump out.  And that is not so bad a metaphor.  If taxation and regulation reach the point where people feel them as oppressive, they can be rolled back through the democratic and lawful process.  Granted, it is not always easy to do.  But, after all, this country once regulated routes and fares for every truck, train and plane.  We don't do that anymore.  Left to the democratic process, we would probably have less regulation than we have now, but more than Goldberg and fellow libertarians consider appropriate.  And we most certainly would not get rid of New Deal and Great Society programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, deposit insurance etc, distasteful as these things may be to libertarians.

"Lizard brain machismo" on the other hand, is the stuff of lynch mobs, of pitchforks and torches, the sort of thing that can short-circuit democratic process and the rule of law in a big hurry.  Goldberg seriously misjudges how little of the Republican Party's appeal is based on actual libertarianism and how much has been based on covert appeals to "lizard brain machismo."  Trump simply took what was covert and made it overt.  Crowds ate it up.

When Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism, he defined fascism broadly enough to mean essentially any  expansion of government beyond what he saw as its proper bounds.  He argued that conservatives (defined as "classical liberals," i.e., libertarians) could not possibly be fascists because they wanted to keep government to a minimum, while modern liberals favored government and were therefore fascists.  He also acknowledged that the book was largely an to angry response to liberals falsely calling conservatives fascists.  And he made silly attempts to establish the defining core trait of fascism as eating organic food.  (Or maybe opposing public smoking or cruelty to animals).  There is a lot of room to argue about the core defining programmatic trait of fascism, but I think it fair to say that the core defining psychological definition of fascism is its appeal to "lizard brain machismo."  And I think it not too much a stretch define the psychology of liberalism (classical or modern) as "unswayed by appeals to lizard brain machismo."  And a psychological definition of conservatism might be "conscious of the appeal of lizard brain machismo but strongly resolved to resist it, either in oneself or others."  Of course, I would also consider "lizard brain machismo" a reasonable definition of authoritarianism in general, and fascism a mere sub-category of authoritarianism.

I don't defend liberals' abuse of the term "fascist" to accuse conservatives of being fascists.  But this abuse of the term can be explained without defending it.  Liberals understand that the psychology underlying fascism is lizard brain machismo.  They recognize that some aspects of conservatism do, indeed, appeal to lizard brain machismo.  And they see that a good many members of the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement are, in fact, acting more out of lizard brain machismo than ideological principles.  So they (falsely) define both conservatism and fascism as simply appeals to lizard brain machismo and lump them together.  This is wrong.  But it does contain a psychological insight that Goldberg is willfully blind to.

But even if Goldberg were to concede that "lizard brain machismo" is what lies at the core of all authoritarianism, including fascism, and that it poses a greater threat to liberty than mere over-regulation, he might then ask why I define it as right-wing.  After all, I concede that it is not conservative. Well, for starters, I certainly agree that there is an authoritarian left that appeals to "lizard brain machismo."  Communism certainly fit the bill, as did black nationalism and the like.  Black Lives Matter undoubtedly has its share of authoritarians, and there are definite signs of nastiness among Bernie Sanders' more hard core followers.  But the authoritarian left is far less influential in the US (for now) than the authoritarian right.  Next, I would point to Goldberg's own definition of conservatism as including "the importance of law and order, the value of military strength etc."  Yet he concedes that emphasizing these things can appeal to "lizard brain machismo" as well as true conservatism.  Hot news flash: if an important part of the conservative program also appeals to authoritarians, then it leaves the conservative movement vulnerable to infiltration by authoritarians. (Isn't that what William F. Buckley was all about -- keeping the authoritarians out of conservatism?  And doesn't that imply that they had an unfortunate tendency to sneak in in disguise?)

And then there is the point made (though no longer accessible) that since vote share is a zero sum game, when a new political movement gains adherents, then someone else necessarily must be losing adherents.  When the Nazi Party grew, for instance, other parties had to be shrinking.  Which parties were shrinking reveals who was switching votes to the Nazis.  And the answer is clear.

The total share of the vote going to the Left shrank.  This means that the Nazis were, indeed, winning adherents from the Left.  But although the left-wing share of the vote fell below what it won in its better years, like 1920 and 1928 (the last year before the Depression), it remained similar to its share in 1924 (the year of the hyperinflation).  In other words, the Left's share of the vote fell to the lower end of the norm, but no lower.  (Not reflected in my charts but disturbing, the moderate Social Democrats saw their share of the votes fall, while the Communist

Vote the year of the hyperinflation 

  Party saw its share of the vote rise).  The Left was losing votes to the Nazis, but that was not where the bulk of the Nazi vote was coming from.

Votes to the center diminished, and the loss is visible on the pie charts, but not all that spectacular because the center vote was not all that large to begin with.  What is significant, though not shown on the pie charts is that Catholic Center share of the vote remained almost unchanged, while the non-Catholic center vote shrank almost to zero.  The Nazis were not winning votes from political Catholics, but Protestant moderates were defecting en masse.

Finally, once the Great Depression hit, votes to traditional right-wing parties made a spectacular decline, to half their former strength in 1930, and to a mere sliver by 1932.  And the Nazi Party was gaining at almost the same rate.  The bulk of Nazi votes came from defection from right-wing parties.  The obvious conclusion is that what the Nazis were offering appealed to the right wing and to non-Catholic moderates, but much less to the Left and not at all to political Catholics.

Last vote before the Depression

The comparison to Trump is obvious.  Trump took the Republican Party by storm.  From the very start, he had strong appeal to Republican primary voters.  As his nomination became more and more inevitable, more and more conventional Republicans went over to him.  At the time of the general election, there is no doubt that he won the votes of some people who had voted for the Democrats in previous elections, especially in the Upper Midwest.  Not all of these voters were white; Trump appears to have done better with all demographics than the two prior Republican

Votes as the Nazis took over

candidates.  So clearly Trump was winning some votes from defecting Democrats.  But there is simply no doubt that the bulk of his vote came from frustrated Republican voters, and that he had the support of well-established right-wing commentators, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter.  Trump is no conservative, but the bulk of the vote share he drew came from the right.**

And here is the really maddening thing.  Goldberg knows this.  At least, that is the take-away from the linked conversation with Hugh Hewitt about the Alt Right.  The Alt Right are some of Trump's earliest and strongest supporters.  And they are, if not fascists, at least wannabes.  They are truly deplorable.  And neither Hewitt nor Goldberg makes any attempt to deny that they really are right-wing.  Goldberg does say that he considers Trump to be "a liberal" and "a New York Democrat" and that that is why he got some of his answers wrong, from a conservative perspective, such as being reluctant to condemn David Duke or saying that women should be punished for having abortions.  In that, Goldberg compares Trump to Mitt Romney.  But he ignores something really obvious.  Romney's poor grasp of what it was to be a true conservative hurt him with Republican voters.  Trump, on the other hand, was wildly appealing, all lapses from the true faith notwithstanding.  Somehow it never occurred to either man that maybe this meant that most Republicans are not true conservatives by their lights but, well, something else.  Something that reacts favorably to appeals to "lizard brain machismo."  They both discuss how to isolate the Alt Right and distinguish them from true conservatives, with Goldberg wanting to draw a sharp line and write out people who have a foot in both camps (like Ann Coulter), and Hewitt wanting to give fence sitters the benefit of the doubt.  But Goldberg makes a very revealing comment about the Alt Right:

There are a lot of people who don’t know what the alt right is. I live in these swamps. I’ve been having these fights for 20 years. I didn’t hear the term alt right until Donald Trump came up. But I know a lot of the people behind the alt right, because I’ve been getting it, they’ve been attacking me and then saying nasty anti-Semitic stuff to me since I started working at National Review. I mean, people are like, the guys at VDARE and these other places, they’ve all coalesced around this idea of the alt right, and it is not a coalitional idea where they want to be part of the conservative movement. It’s that they want to replace the conservative movement.. . . Milo [Yiannopoulos, an Alt Right shock jock] writes grand defenses of these guys who send pictures of me in gas chambers, and of David French’s black adopted child being gassed, and sent pictures of, you know, me being hung. And Milo thinks that stuff is hilarious.

Yes, that's right.  These aren't "friendly fascists" or "smiley face fascists," they are actual defenders of classical fascism.  And Goldberg has been dealing with them for 20 years.  That means he was dealing with them the whole time he was writing Liberal Fascism and claiming that fascism is a movement of the left, and that the biggest threat to liberty these days is from public smoking bans and the like.  That means he was dealing with them when David Neiwert pointed out that there are actual fascists in the US today and Goldberg replied by dismissing them as trivial compared to the mortal peril from Hillary Clinton's latest blather.  Think of that every time Goldberg calls liberals the real fascists or dismisses real fascists as too marginalized to matter.  He was "liv[ing] in the swamps" and fighting these guys even as he said it!

And there is one more thing to add.  Goldberg really should go back and take a refresher course on how Mussolini and Hitler came to power.  They didn't come to power by violent revolution, or by winning an absolute electoral majority for their parties.  They came to power by making an alliance with conservatives.  There were plenty of countries in which the conservatives remained resolutely opposed to fascism.  In all cases, they were able to keep the fascists out of power.  (Although many of these countries became right wing dictatorships of other kinds).  Only in Italy and Germany did the conservatives ultimately decide that the fascists were the lesser evil compared to the left.***  And not just the Hard Left, or the Communists.  Conservatives developed wildly exaggerated fears about the Social Democrats, even though they regularly respected all rules of the game, and convinced themselves that the SD's were such an intolerable threat that they were prepared to make common cause with the fascists against them.  Then he should read how many fellow conservatives were prepared to make common cause with Trump, despite his Alt Right followers, because they regarded Hillary Clinton, hardly distinguishable from Obama, as so grave a threat that our form of government might not survive her election.  And he should really think about it.

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*And, ironically, the harshest critic of the Northern system of ethnic patronage were the people Goldberg most despises as proto-fascists -- the Progressives.  Progressives disdained the ethnic spoils systems as corrupt and sought, instead to introduce a professional civil service that introduced to sort of technocratic, administrative government that Goldberg sees as the biggest threat to liberty today.  (Proof, once again, that politics of the past don't line up so well compared to politics today).  Presumably Goldberg would say that ethnic patronage machines and a technocratic civil service are simply different forms of the same error -- the belief that government is capable of doing good.
**And, it is fair to ask, what about European populists like Marine LePen, who are gaining vote share exactly as the center-left parties decline or even disappear.  Doesn't that make them left-wing?  And here I will have to pass it off by saying that does seem the logic of what I have said so far, but these parties are nonetheless uniformly seen as right-wing.
***Spain is something of a special case, and people are divided on whether to consider Franco a fascist.  The usual conclusion, though, is that Franco is better characterized as a reactionary who made an alliance with the fascists and then discarded them when they were no longer useful to him.