We Need a Plan B

Can we face facts?  This last week two events (arguably three) occurred that have likely secured the election for Trump.

First, the economy showed clear signs of softening with inflation still above target, and consumer sentiment tanked.  (Is that one event or two?)  Second, our college campuses broke out in riots, occupation, and police crackdown, creating a general impression of chaos and the desire for a law and order candidate.

All of this means that Donald Trump is most likely to win in November.  I do not mean we should stop trying to defeat him.  But it does mean we should start making a Plan B.  

Most people I have talked to when asked about a Plan B have said move somewhere else.  That is defeatist and just turns the country over to Trump by draining it of his opponents.  

So, can we please get some perspective and start thinking what comes next?

When this country was founded, the iconic example of democracy failing was Rome. Today it is Germany.  But, while Weimar is worth considering as an example how how democracies die, these analogies can be taken too far.  Trump is not Hitler.  Nor is he Putin.  He is not even Recep Erdogan.  More plausibly, he is Viktor Orban, a fairly mild dictator.  Orban did not consolidate power overnight.  Neither did Erdogan (or Putin, for that matter).  

Furthermore, we have two advantages over Hungary or Turkey.  One is that political power in the US is extremely diffuse and our independent institutions are extensive, leaving numerous point for resistance.  

Second, Donald Trump is an absolute idiot who knows nothing whatever about policy and wants to do numerous things that will be either impracticable or wildly unpopular.  And yes, I know he has people working with him to throw off the constraints of our bureaucratic institutions (the "Deep State") that restrained him last time. That will mean throwing off the constraints that protected the country from Trump, but also the constraints that protected Trump from himself.  That will be what undermines him most.  President FAFO.

So, I have some advice on what to do and what not to do.

Not to do:  Give up, flee the country, riot, smash things, block traffic, occupy public spaces and set up camp, train militias for armed resistance.

To do:  Donate to organizations that plan to resist Trump, such as the ACLU.  Volunteer for such organizations.  Support Democratic candidates and anti-Trump Republicans at all levels of government.  Organize election campaigns.  Protest peacefully.  Figure out an protest style that discourages bad elements.  Get the word out what is happening.  And do what you can to make society better through non-governmental channels.

PS:  Details to come.

Lev Parnas Interview

 

Denver Riggleman, former Air Force intelligence officer, Republican Congressman and data man for the Select Committee on January 6, has two interviews of Lev Parnas on his podcast that are intentionally incomplete, describing only a part of Parnas' adventures and Rudy Giuliani's point man in Ukraine, presumably as a teaser to entice listeners into buying Parnas' book setting forth his adventures in greater detail.  

I found the first half interesting and the second half wildly implausible.

By Parnas' account, Giuliani was traveling throughout Ukraine in 2018 looking for evidence of Ukrainian "interference" in the 2016 election.  He did not go into detail on this, saying that he was not involved in that part.  Joe Biden was not on Giuliani's radar screen for most of 2018.

The focus on Biden apparently began in November, 2018, when Giuliani heard the recording of Biden's speech to the Counsel on Foreign Relations in which he boasted about getting Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired.  The actual speech took place on January 23, 2018, but Giuliani apparently did not learn about it until that November.  For reasons that are not clear, Giuliani jumped to the conclusion that Biden demanded the firing for corrupt reasons.*   He promptly tasked Parnas and Parnas' friend Igor Fruman to find Shokin.  

The two were successful and sought to bring Shokin to the US, but Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch denied him a visa.  And I honestly do not know enough to say whether this was or was not appropriate on her part, but it certainly contributed to Giuliani's general hostility to her.  Instead, Giuliani and his associates talked to Shokin by Skype in January, 2019.  While Shokin was able to describe Hunter's activities in highly suggestive and sinister terms, nothing he described was actually illegal.  Giuliani, experienced lawyer that he was, recognized this and cut the conversation short, demanding to know what Hunter did that was actually illegal.  Shokin could only say that he did not find anything illegal, BUT he was sure that was just because he was fired before he found it and that the proof was somewhere in the Prosecutor General's office.**

The sensible thing to do at this point was realize that Shokin was stringing them on.  Naturally, Giuliani did nothing of the kind, and instead decided to find Shokin's successor, Yuri Lutsenko, to see what he had to offer.  So when Lutsenko contacted them two days later to say that he was in the US and wanted them to arrange a meeting with Bill Barr, Parnas was inclined to think it was not a coincidence.  

Actually, to judge from the conversation, it probably was just a coincidence. The conversation was about a wholly unrelated corruption matter that Lutsenko was investigating that involved US players and that he seemed interested in pursuing.  Giuliani was uninterested in anything that did not promote Trump's personal fortunes and said he had no interest in anything that did not involve Hunter Biden, but would be willing to arrange a meeting with Barr for $200,000.  Parnas says that Lutsenko had looked to the US in general and Giuliani in particular as heroes of honest government and was shocked at the shakedown.  On the whole, Parnas appears to treat Lutsenko and the President, Petro Poroshenko, as good faith actors who were serious about fighting Ukrainian corruption.*** 

Nonetheless, Lutsenko took the hint and the next day brought financial records that proved that Hunter had worked for Burisma and that Burisma had paid him, but nothing proving actual criminality.  Trump actually called during the conversation to see how it was going and demonstrate how important it was to him.

Their next meeting took place in the week of Valentine's Day, 2019 and was in Poland because Giuliani did not want to be seen traveling to Ukraine. (Parnas says they met in a bar and drank over $8000 worth of whiskey, which sounds positively lethal!).  The most significant event was that Lutsenko arranged for Parnas to travel to Ukraine to meet with President Poroshenko, then running for reelection against Zelensky.  After some cloak and dagger maneuvers to conceal the meeting, Parnas offered Trump's endorsement for reelection if Poroshenko would give him dirt on the Bidens. Poroshenko was skeptical, saying that last time they met, Trump had offered his endorsement if Poroshenko would buy coal from a particular town in Pennsylvania so Trump could boast about it at a campaign rally.  Poroshenko obliged and got nothing in return, so he refused to commit.

Again, Parnas seems to see Poroshenko as a good faith actor.  It also makes Zelensky's refusal to bend to Trump's demands for dirt seem somewhat less remarkable.  Both men were trying to clean up Ukrainian governance and being undermined by the US President.

It was interesting and revealed things I had not previously known.  In part 2, Riggleman promised more shocking details, but the whole thing sounded frankly paranoid.  Parnas said he started hearing in February about getting access to Hunter's laptop. This was significant because it took place before Hunter dropped off the laptop at the repair shop that April.  Riggleman also teased out details about meetings with actual agents of Russian intelligence, but none of this was actually discussed in the interview (teasing for the book, I assume).

Instead, they skipped over directly to Parnas' arrest on October 9, 2019, just about the time the first impeachment inquiry was heating up.  Parnas said he believed that he was arrested at the order of William Barr to prevent him from blowing the whole thing open and revealing information that would have left the Senate with no choice but to convict.

That makes no sense at all, on multiple levels.  First of all, it is abundantly clear that Republican Senators' refusal to convict had nothing to do with the evidence.  Donald Trump could have shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and Republican Senators would not have voted to convict.  (The second impeachment is proof of that).  Second, at the time of his arrest, Parnas was fulling in the tank for Trump, refusing to release subpoenaed documents.  If summoned in front of the investigating committee, he would undoubtedly have taken the Fifth.  Finally, Parnas an Fruman were arrested for campaign finance violations, and Riggleman makes the point that arrests for such charges are almost unheard-of.  What both men avoid discussing is that Parnas and Fruman were arrested at the airport with one-way tickets out of the country.  In other words, it appears that they were arrested to keep them from fleeing the country to avoid testifying against Trump!

All of which very strongly suggests that it was not, in fact, brought at Barr's direction, but the work of DOJ professionals with the Southern District of New York, acting very much at cross-purposes from Trump.  In other words, this was yet again the work of the so-called "Deep State."

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*Hunter Biden's role in Burisma was well known and much criticized at the time, so presumably that is the answer. 
**Parnas, it should be noted, is ambiguous about whether Burisma was actually doing anything corrupt, or whether Shokin was simply using investigations as an excuse to shake them down.
***This is actually surprising, in light of documents Parnas previously released, which seemed to indicate that Lutsenko was hostile to Yovanovitch because of her aggressiveness on corruption and demanded her firing as a condition of giving any dirt on the Bidens.  In this interview, Parnas treats Lutsenko as a good faith actor and the initiative as coming from the US side.  Another data point in assessing his credibility.

Memo to Campus Protesters: It Isn't Working

 

Memo to campus protesters:  I am not quite sure what you are trying to achieve, but if it is anything more than just draw attention to yourself, it isn't working.  Certainly you are not achieving anything in terms of ending the war.

So far as I can tell, most of the campus protesters have given up on actually ending the war and are focusing on getting their colleges to divest from any companies that do business with Israel.  Needless to say, the impact of such divestment on the immediate humanitarian crisis will be essentially zero. Nor will divestment lead to the destruction of Israel, which appears to be the end game.  So what is the point?  If the point is to avoid being complicit in moral evil -- well there are a whole lot of moral evils left in the world that you will still be complicit in.

The usual response of protesters to any criticism whatever is that whatever conduct you are criticizing is trivial compared to "genocide" in Gaza.  And just for the record, I actually agree that it is not inconsistent or hypocritical to protest this war and not numerous other wars going on in the world today.  Other wars may have a higher total death toll, but that is out of a larger baseline population, and over a longer time span. The damage to housing has been described as "unseen since WWII."  And certainly it is fair and reasonable to focus more effort on a war being fought with US weapons and funding that we have considerable leverage to stop than one where our role and our leverage is minimal.

But these protests are less than worthless and ending the carnage.  Before the student protests, there were numerous stories about the suffering in Gaza, Israel's obstructive inspections of humanitarian aid and the like.  The protests have moved the focus here and taken it off the actual war.

Underlying the whole escalation is a flawed assumption that the more extreme the measure, the more effective.  If marches and demonstrations don't turn public opinion against Israel, try camping out in the quad. If that is not effective, then seize buildings. If that doesn't work, bar access to the school to anyone who does not support your cause and block traffic. The assumption seems to be that being in a miles-long traffic jam will finally alert people that the war is wrong.  Sorry, dudes, it doesn't work that way.  It just makes you, rather than the war, the story and makes people angry about the disruption.

At this point, protesters may ask what do I suggest as an alternative.  What could they have done?  Well, so far as I can tell, while the rank and file protesters are ill-informed newbies who were recently focused on some other cause de juer, the leadership of the movement seems to consist of actual Palestinians -- mostly women.*  This gives the movement a real authenticity and refutes people dismissing it as mere "cosplay."

So here is my suggestion.  Why not hold teach-ins and give these women the chance to tell their stories. Palestinians in the US, whether citizens or students on visas, invariably have family members killed in the war, homes destroyed, people who fled their homes, only to be bombed in supposed safe refuges, and so forth. With today's instant communications, these family members have presumably sent photographs and videos to relatives in the US.  So tell their stories, show the pictures and videos, bring this war home to people., make it real. Make this an exercise in citizen journalism.  Invite the college newspaper to attend and publish the stories.  Invite your local newspapers to do the same.  Publish this on social media -- Twitter, Tik-Tok, Facebook, You-Tube, podcasts, etc.  Set up websites and old-style blogs.  Urge readers/viewers/listeners to contact their members of Congress and call for an end to funding of the war.  Provide a link to find who your member of Congress is.  

These actions may be of limited value.  Evidence suggests that the real secret to reaching a large audience is to tape in to one of the major communications nodes that draws large numbers of viewers.  But that is where being part of an elite institution really matters.  Presumably at least some of these students have the sort of elite connections that give them an inside line to major communications nodes.  Use them to contact these nodes and get your story out.  That is how you build the sort of political pressure that might actually force our government to stop supporting this war.

PS:  The latest word on negotiations is that Netanyahu is telling Hamas that if they will release hostages, he will delay a few weeks before he moves in to finish them off.  Needless to say, this is just another way of saying he has no desire for a negotiated end to the war.

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*So where are the Palestinian men?  I don't know, but my guess is they are the ones harassing Jews on the street.

A Few Notes on the Trump Criminal Trial in New York

I have not been following the Trump criminal trial closely.  Given the efforts made be federal courts to prevent him from being tried on anything else, I have become more sympathetic than before to the idea that this is a case of prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion.

But the case still troubles me. It is an allegation of cooking the books to conceal "election interference" in the form of National Enquirer's plan to suppress any stories that might be damaging to Trump.

It is amply clear that Trump cooked the books, but is a trivial matter like perjury or tax evasion, generally only prosecuted if there is a serious underlying crime than cannot be reached.  And I am having trouble seeing the underlying crime here.

Basically, David Pecker of the National Enquirer agreed to pay hush money to anyone who had a story that could hurt Trump, and to run hit pieces on his political rivals.  That is not illegal.  To be clear, not all of it is protected by the First Amendment. Pecker admitted to falsifying a photograph of Ted Cruz's father to make a fabricated story linking him to pro-Castro Cubans and even to the John F. Kennedy assassination.  Telling knowing lies of that kind is not protected by the First Amendment. It is textbook defamation and is civilly actionable (although presumably the statute of limitations has expired), but it is not a crime.

The National Enquirer coordinated carefully with the Trump campaign.  Pecker met with Trump to discuss what stories out there might be dangerous, how to spot them, how to suppress them, and what to say about Trump's rivals.  This goes against accepted journalistic ethics, which do not allow publications to act as propaganda arms unless they openly proclaim themselves to be so (such as the Daily Worker, openly proclaimed propaganda sheet for the Communist Party). Other political campaigns have made clear that they have never had such an arrangement and that such things are absolutely not normal.  But that is not the same as saying that such things are a crime.

But standards of journalistic ethics are not laws. The only enforcement mechanisms are publicity and shame, neither of which has much effect on the National Enquirer.  And so far as I can tell, the right wing media does not see these standards as binding on them. They see any claims of journalistic ethics is mere cover for liberal bias and if mainstream outlets do not blatantly coordinate with campaigns -- well, they do so implicitly and they are much bigger than the right wing media, so the right wing media has to be more direct to compete.

The question is whether any of this breaks campaign finance laws. I don't pretend to know.  There has been one attempt to prosecute payoffs to a mistress as unreported campaign contributions in the case of John Edwards.  The jury declined to convict, which is not legally binding precedent, but can reasonably be taken as a guideline on how to exercise prosecutorial discretion. 

In Edwards' case, the bribes were paid by a rich friend.  In Trump's case, the rich friend was acting on behalf of a for-profit corporation.  Apparently there are campaign finance laws restricting coordination for between a campaign and a for-profit corporation, and for obvious reasons. The room for corruption is all too apparent.  But in the case of media entities, such restrictions raise a host of difficult first amendment questions.. Is advocacy journalism really an unreported campaign contribution?  What about puff pieces, or hit pieces, that even purportedly objective publications routinely publish?  And what about editorials?  What about granting anonymity to a campaign insider with a self-serving account?  The possibilities are too extensive to consider.

On the other hand, I can't help but wonder what the reaction might be if the shoe were one the other foot.  After all, Jeff Gerth of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote a whole series denouncing Hillary Clinton's conduct in the 2016 election as scandalous for encouraging the press to publish stories about Trump's ties to Russia and drew attention to the ones that were actually published.  John Durham was in an absolute tizzy that Hillary Clinton tried to "stir up a scandal" about Trump's ties to Russia and, while he acknowledged that stirring up a scandal about your political opponent is not a crime, thinks it was definitive proof of Trump's innocence and should have been seen so by the FBI.

And, of course, when Twitter and Facebook declined to circulate the New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop, this led to accusations of weaponization of government, Congressional investigation, and Elon Musk buying out Twitter to prevent further acts of "censorship."  It should be noted that the Post story was still out there and anyone curious could have found it by a Google or other internet search, and that both social media companies relented within a matter of days.  But no matter, there was at least a partial attempt to halt circulation of a story that could hurt a Trump opponent, and his supporters thought the matter worthy of committee hearings.

Imagine the outcry if such a story had been completely suppressed until after the election.

More on Horseshoe Theory

 

So, is horseshoe theory -- the idea and the far right and the far left loop backward to meet each other -- true?  Looking at how many things I have generally considered left wing -- living off the grid, organic food, distrust of big pharma and big money, etc -- clearly there is something to it.  

At the same time, there are differences.  I was fascinated, for instance by this article, discussing how J. Edgar Hoover's FBI targeted not only the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, but also the Ku Klux Klan and other groups on the far right. Hoover, who presumably had experience to know, did not regard Communists and Klansmen as mirror opposites.  Communists might be persuaded by histories, pamphlets, and serious intellectual discussion.  Klansmen could not intellectually or emotionally grasp anything above the comic book level.

But I think there are other differences as well. This is my latest attempt to understand the difference between left and right, authoritarian and non-authoritarian:

	Left Thinks in terms of oppressors and oppressed	Right Thinks in terms of in-groups and out-groups
Authoritarian Aggressive and punitive toward disfavored groups	Seeks revolt on behalf of oppressed to pull down and punish oppressors	Seeks to subordinate, exclude, scapegoat, or punish out groups
Non-authoritarian Not aggressive or punitive toward disfavored groups	Seeks to include oppressed groups in the larger society on an equal basis	Seeks to build strong communities within their group. Outsiders may form their own communities.

Not here that I am expressing these viewpoints mostly from the perspective a the dominant group. Oppressed or out-groups (from the perspective of the dominant group) can weigh in at many different places in this table.  

They may ally with liberals (the non-authoritarian left), seeking to be included on an equal basis with the dominant group.  This might be considered the hopeful mode.

They may ally with the authoritarian left, seeking to pull down and punish the dominant group. This might be considered the angry or frustrated mode.

They may make a separate conservatism (non-authoritarian right), forming their own tight-knit communities and community ties separate and apart from the dominant community.

On the one hand, one might think oppressed groups could not possibly find a home in the far right, which is actively aggressive and punitive toward them.  On the other hand the whole concept that oppressor/oppressed and in-group/out-group are different approaches presupposes the perspective of the dominant group. From the perspective of the excluded or oppressed group, there is no difference.  The in-group and the oppressed group are one and the same.  From that perspective, the difference between between being aggressive and punitive towards outsiders because they are oppressors, and being aggressive and punitive towards outsiders simply because they are outsiders becomes more a matter of emphasis than substance.  The horseshoe becomes a full circle.

I also believe that the oppressor/oppressed distinction of the left carries more moral weight than the us/them distinction of the right. That may be why so many authoritarians of the right are eager to adopt the status of victim of oppression.*  

It does not explain so well why so many members of the left seem to be moving over to the authoritarian right.

PS:  I will also add that conservatives might critique my dichotomy between the liberal and authoritarian left and say that they are the true liberals, wanting to build a color blind society, while liberal activists use the language of inclusion to stigmatize and discriminate against white people.  To this I would reply that yes, lines are not always sharp and clear, that pressing too far for inclusion can tend to devalue and exclude traditionally dominant groups.  I would also say that such discrimination falls well short of, say, campus activists barring Jews from entry unless they renounce Zionism and the like. I would also say that conservative groups who focus on their own community and assume that others can do the same are being naive (sometimes willfully so) about the disadvantages minority/oppressed communities may face and ignoring the extent to which this has the real world effect of subordinating and excluding disadvantaged groups.

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*Another reason may be the distinction above -- the whole idea of applying the rules to one's in-group is oppression.  

PS

 

One last note to the people (and they are many) who argue that really the authoritarian Left is a bigger danger than the authoritarian Right.  Looking at our college campuses, I can agree that we have an authoritarian Left and it may be a real danger some day.

But right here and now, the influence of the authoritarian Left in the corridors of power is dwarfed by the authoritarian right.  The clear measure is the recent foreign aid bill passed by the House.

Voting against aid to Ukraine -- 112 Republicans, no Democrats.

Voting against aid to Israel -- 37 Democrats, 21 Republicans.

The power of the Hamas Party in Congress is dwarfed by the Putin Party.

Afterword

 

And, for the record now, allow me to make a reading recommendation for authoritarians, left and right, and for non-authoritarians as well -- Richard Wright's Native Son.  Native Son is a hard book to read -- intentionally so. It challenges assumptions on the Left that being oppressed is any proof of virtue, and assumptions on the Right that systematic racism does not exist and that everyone can get ahead by individual effort.

If a White person were to write such a novel, it would be dismissed as racist.  But Native Son is by a Black man, a Communist, no less, wanting to rub his audience's nose in certain cold hard facts and deny them the comfort of any sympathy or warm feelings.

Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black youth in Chicago, 1940.  Bigger lives in a squalid, rat-infested ghetto and has a longstanding history of petty crime -- all with Black victims since he has never dared take on a White victim.  And he ends up accidentally killing a very naive, well-intentioned White girl who was trying, in a clumsy, unwelcome way, to help him, tripping himself up with attempts to cover up the crime, and being sentenced to the electric chair.

Bigger is not a sympathetic protagonist. But the novel sets out to make the point of how circumstances made him.

The journalism in the novel is egregiously racist in a way that would be unthinkable these days.  (Wright says it was based on actual stories in newspapers around the time he wrote the novel).  But other than the journalists who write the stories, the White characters in the novel individually seem like decent people, police and DA's seeking Bigger's execution included.  

While the novel is meant primarily to discomfort liberals who seek to acquit themselves of systematic racism, it ought also to discomfort conservatives who deny that such a thing exists.  Yes, sometimes it could almost be taken as endorsing the "Snake Song."  Bigger's liberal employer takes him in, offers him a job, and is rewarded by the murder of his Communist-sympathizing daughter.  Right wingers might take this as proof that parents should not expose their children to any liberal notions that might lead to Communist sympathies, keep their children in line, not try to help disadvantaged Black people, and maintain strict law and order.

But the novel also discusses systematic racism and the way that individually good people can be complicit.  Bigger's employer invests in the rat-infested tenements where Bigger lives -- not personally, but through a complex set of corporations.  And the business ethics of the day do not allow him to admit Black renters to any other neighborhoods.

And, in the end, the final third of the novel consists largely of a lecture by Boris ("Author Insert") Max, the Communist lawyer seeking to get Bigger off on a sentence of life imprisonment, and his explanation of how racism pervades the larger society and deprives men like Bigger of hope.

It is uncomfortable reading.  That is why it should be encouraged.