The phrase “politics of resentment” has been used to describe the bravura style of mass influence employed by demagogues Mussolini and Hitler who harnessed the grievances and resentment of people screwed by the powerful.   What does a resentful audience respond to?  Strong expressions of undisguised malice.

We will hang these traitors from lamp posts!   (huge applause)   We will punish each of these sick and audacious criminals with a slow painful death!  (chant)   We will not let these rapists get away with their crimes against the innocents among us!  (grunts of approval)  The day of our long-denied vengeance has finally arrived!  (fists pump)  Lock her up!  (chant) etc.

Malice is all that remains when every other imaginable avenue of improving a situation is blocked.   You could call malice a  moral failing, a failure of imagination, or a character flaw, but it has its psychological uses.   Malice, which is aggressive and directed outward toward a hated enemy, is seen by most people as a more vital emotion than hopelessness, an inward focused depressed admission of defeat in a rigged game.  

Malice gives the illusion of power.  You say I’m powerless?  FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT, I’LL KILL YOU!    Feels better than “Jesus, you’re right, there really is nothing I can do after being fucked the way I was…” doesn’t it?  An illusory feeling of manliness, since malice, which feeds on a sense of worthlessness, only diminishes a person, though it’s seen preferable to an admission of hopelessness to most people, I suspect.

Arguing based on malice, which easily takes Reason out of the discussion, explains a lot about our politics today.  Mr. Trump is a master of malice.  He comes by his maliciousness the old fashioned way– hopeless envy of others.   He comes by this honestly.   He was not his father’s first choice to run the family business.   He was a spiteful little bully, and not the smartest of the five children, by a long shot.  The first born, dad’s favorite, was not cut out to be the ruthless steward of his father’s fortune, he broke his father’s heart and died a broken man himself.  The fourth born, the second male in line, the spiteful little bully who kept acting out, was sent away to military academy to learn self-discipline and to “man up”, then kept out of the wartime draft by a powerful father who was grooming him, relentlessly and demandingly, to take over his empire.    

Mr. Trump squandered everything his father gave him, more than $400,000,000 in today’s dollars.  Then he tried to take control of the family fortune before his father was dead (he was deep in debt and needed the money).  His father exerted himself one last time, had his lawyers stop his impetuous and hotheaded son from wasting the rest of the family fortune.  When the old man died, Mr. Trump ignored his father’s wishes that the Trump properties stay in the family and sold off his father’s entire empire at a loss.  He needed the money.  Taking a hit of a few hundred million did not seem that big a deal, in light of the circumstances.  He and his sisters and little brother all did very well, the proceeds of the sale, although the properties were sold at a steeply discounted price, made all of them very, very wealthy.  Vast wealth is never enough for someone filled with malice.

Trump has to realize, on some level, that he is not a very good businessman.   He was a blustering snake oil salesman, trying one scam after another to increase his fortune, to shore up his losses in bad deals and foolish decisions in his other businesses.  He was a failure in every business he set up, declaring bankruptcy several times.  He had the fabulous good luck of “Reality TV”.   At the time he was approached by TV producers about fronting a show about his fabulous life he admits he was virtually broke.  Pointing to a homeless bum on the street near Trump Tower he reportedly told his daughter Ivanka (according to them both) that he was basically in the same boat as that worthless fucker.

Then he got to play his dream version of himself on TV.   A winner who never made a wrong move, ever.  A sought-after mentor to the most ambitious contestants on his zero-sum winner-take-all show.   He was transformed, by “reality TV”, from a wealthy attention seeking jackass to an icon of American success, America’s greatest winner.  Millions watched him play this character on TV, waited for him to deploy his winning catch phrase every week as he eliminated another contender to be his apprentice.  Somehow “you’re fired” resonated with millions of downtrodden Americans who apparently lived vicariously through Trump’s gold-plated persona.  Go figure.  Building this carefully stage managed image of himself as the smartest businessman in America was his greatest achievement.   He owes his great success to a great network television production team and to his own his ability to harness and channel malice.   At malice, he is simply the best.

Yale Historian Timothy Snyder, author of the 2016 On Tyranny,  has been all over media lately, analyzing our ravaged nation’s rapid slide toward open autocracy.   His quote on the lesson of history resonates strongly with my own view on the matter — since the future is entirely an exercise, to those who still insist on our agency as citizens of a democracy, in imagining possibilities, informed by knowledge of the past:

[H]istory does not repeat. But it does offer us examples and patterns, and thereby enlarges our imaginations and creates more possibilities for anticipation and resistance.^[19]

I recently saw his 2018 talk at Harvard on youTube.  Snyder lays out the recent history of the politics of US vs. THEM, the dividing line of current Western politics (not only in the U.S. but Hungary, Turkey, UK, Brazil, India, etc.)  He discusses how a politics based on defining friend and enemy, (with the appropriate treatment for each category), is antithetical to  the democratic goal of a rules-bound politics of consensus, a system of institutions and laws designed to protect the weak and restrain the impulse of the powerful to favor friends and punish enemies. 

Snyder cites our increasing reliance on the internet as the biggest single factor fostering this Us and Them oversimplification of the world and the rightward distortion of our politics.  He argues that the unreal online world of the internet has been the biggest single factor in flattening a complicated three dimensional world into a largely self-affirming two-dimensional one.   

Rather than increasing our critical abilities, with our unprecedented access to the total accumulated information of the world, our online lives have flattened our range of exploration by instantly and robotically providing us opinions and glosses that affirm our preconceptions.   The internet now serves us personalized content tailored to what the algorithms know we already prefer.  The hours most of us spend on online every day deaden our ability to reason our way to conclusions based on actual facts, real things that actually happened in the real, three-dimensional interactive world.  Time spent online, in a virtual cocoon of like-minded opinion, also saps our will to meet other humans in the real world to strategize with and take concerted action with.  

In cyber space it is easy to magnify certain things while disappearing others.  In an immersive cyber world it is fairly easy to erase the very real problems confronted by the actual humans who make up the abstract, hated “Them” — rendering “them” nonexistent.  Millions of desperate refugees fleeing real atrocities and climate disasters in far away countries?  Their existence and their terrible dilemmas can easily be erased on the internet, reducing them solely to their emotional use in tropes, memes and bots shaping “our” opinion toward “them.”

If you stay in your internet silo the chances for real-world participation start to seem less real than the stimulating and addictive interactions (with humans or bots, one never knows) you can constantly have on-screen.   I had a dramatic example of this recently, in trying to leave the online space for human interaction in the real world.  I was disappointed by the website of the large militant Brooklyn and D.C-based nonprofit clearinghouse that I’d visited with great anticipation that it would provide local options for live participation in the struggle to retain democracy. The end user (me) was offered no possibility of live interaction with other human activists, only online petitions and donation buttons. There were also great press releases about the many successes by this well-funded group in fighting back against oppressive policies.   Leaving me with only online options for “action”.

To complicate matters, and make the determination of what is fact and what is fabricated bullshit supremely hard, on-line there’s no way to know which comment is from a like-minded human being (or one you don’t agree with) and which is simply a comment fabricated for influence, generated per algorithm, expressed and personally delivered by a bot. The influence of this false “Us” is huge.

The human troll plays an outsized role in political outcomes on the internet as well.  The troll can sit anywhere in the world.   Snyder gives the example of Michael Flynn and Russia, how Flynn found himself citing numerous Russian troll- bots for definitive answers to questions of American political opinion.

Our addiction to the cyber world is, at this moment in time, moving us toward a fascistic view of the world as the battlefield for eternal war between irreconcilable enemies, away from increased liberalism or the interconnectedness humans require to solve perilous ecological and economic challenges.

In order to understand the potential of the internet to move toward greater human understanding and freedom we need to see it through the lens of history. Snyder says.  The printing press (driver of protracted religious warfare) and the radio (instrumental in the rise of fascism) were at first very destructive social forces as well.   The current polarizing power of the internet can be fixed over time, perhaps, but it is best to understand and be wary of its outsized power to evoke and affirm strong feelings to drive political outcomes.  At present human emotions are being manipulated by robots, mechanized entities brought into “existence” by coders.  This is a one way transaction in evoking strong feelings from targeted humans, since the robots stoking these feelings are incapable of any feelings at all.

Snyder calls for the  “revalorization of factuality” — the notion that it’s actually heroic to analyze and understand the world based on facts, discoverable in the three-dimensional world, easily compressed into unreality in a two-dimensional world.   The project of all tyranny begins in the destruction of “fact” in favor of a strong, emotional call to fight an inhuman enemy.   Good local news coverage by independent reporters, increasingly hard to come by, is one antidote to this trend that Synder singles out as something essential to support.  He urges us all to subscribe to and support our valued news sources.

The US and Them distinction powerfully cuts across all discussion, debate, every chance of human understanding.   It’s hard to even have a discussion about justice without immediately falling into one of two artificially drawn political camps. 

A recent email I wrote discussing institutional injustice, opposition to it and the debate between moderate incrementalists vs. urgent “justice delayed is justice denied” types (especially in the context of acting to save the planet before it is actually uninhabitable), and my strong sympathy for the latter, convinced an old friend that I had to be “all in for Bernie”.  This immediately caused him to fear an ugly confrontation with me, as he’s had with other Sanders-supporting friends lately, since he feels the only pragmatic and realistic thing is to hold one’s nose and vote for whoever the DNC selects as a candidate, rather than dogmatically fighting for what can never be.   Trump, he says (and I don’t disagree), must be defeated if we are to avoid truly terrible outcomes and it’s as simple as that.

So instead of he and I being able to have a reason-based back and forth discussion of principles, we are instantly reduced to arguing about our feelings towards the mass-marketed individual celebrity horses in a zero-sum celebrity horse race, covered mainly by dishonest brokers serving a profit-driven corporate agenda. 

Here, of course, with no intention to do it, I’ve indicated my preference for a Sanders or Warren, who openly point out and have plans to attack institutional injustice, and my extreme distaste for a “moderate” like Bloomberg [1] or Biden.  As we are simplemindedly taught to do here, on the politically “reasonable” side of the aisle, nobody’s totally right, nobody’s totally wrong, the main thing is to defeat a dangerous would-be autocrat and his powerful backers, let’s split the difference and have someone “electable” who won’t upset anybody as much as a “radical” harping on vast, long-time inequalities of opportunity.   It’s US vs. THEM after all, and the main thing is not to let those Nazi fuckers cheat, and win, again.

A rant full of sound and fury mostly,  a fearful cry of pain and frustration at the powerlessness we all feel as isolated citizens with extremely limited say (we’re not corporations, after all) staring at our screens for hope, or at least affirmation.   The best thing to do to deny Nazis their ultimate triumph, is to fight them where they stand — based on superior and infinitely more moral ideas about the future of humanity.  The enemies of progress, those who want to turn the clock back to 1953, stand strongly online, to be sure, but they also stand everywhere else.   We need to gather together and stand against them in the real world (he said firmly, online).

[1]  Mike Bloomberg is a supremely foul piece of shit that we in New York City got to see close up for three terms (though non-billionaire mayors are limited to two terms).   I will lay out some of this motherfucker’s more alarming “peccadillos” in another post.

If your goal is to destroy the administrative state, end all regulation and stop the enforcement of coercive laws that protect only the poor, those demanding and parasitic “takers”, while ensuring maximum liberty for the most privileged to enjoy the unfettered pursuit of happiness, the shambolic [1] Mr. Trump is the perfect president  for you.  Mr. Trump, shameless showman and all-star sower of chaos, is the perfect president for those interested only in preserving, or enhancing, their own vast privilege.   

Trump’s manifest lifelong unconcern with law, rules and norms, his constant pursuit of self-interest above everything else, his mania for “winning”, coupled with his very limited attention span,  makes him the perfect man for the job.   His inattention to detail is catnip for those who have specific targets of  attack to cripple the impediments to their complete freedom from government coercion.  He is always happy to do nothing, if it benefits his biggest donors.   The devil in any regulatory scheme is in the details, as any high-stakes white collar criminal knows, so create enough havoc and certain key details will get lost in the shuffle.  Leave open appointments for agency heads, don’t fill government jobs as they become vacant, employ acting-directors so as not to require Senate confirmation, and so on. 

For example, we learn (from the excellent investigative podcast Trump Inc.) that the Federal Election Commission is currently unable to enforce federal campaign finance law.  All the perfect president has had to do to ensure this is nothing.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent regulatory agency whose purpose is to enforce campaign finance law in United States federal elections. Founded in April 1975, after adoption of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Washington, D.C. based agency employed 339 Americans as of 2006 and, as of 2017, an annual budget of $79,000,000.  Its six commissioners, three from each major party, are appointed by the President.      See: Wikipedia

In order to vote to refer a criminal prosecution for violations of campaign finance law, a law the president himself appears to have violated when he was named as Individual One in a campaign finance violation that put his personal lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen in prison, the six commissioners, three Democratic, three Republican, must vote do do so [2].  Republicans have been historically reluctant to bring these complaints to enforce campaign finance laws, which require, at minimum, a quorum of four to vote on.  

There are currently only three FEC commissioners, making it impossible to have a quorum.  No quorum, no vote to enforce the federal campaign finance laws.   So all Trump had to do to ensure that there is no enforcement of federal campaign finance law, and, obviously,  no penalty for its violations, was — nothing.   Which he always does with aplomb.   He has been otherwise very busy, since the day he was inaugurated in 2017, focusing on his reelection campaign and driving huge rally crowds into continual frenzies.

Interesting note: Don McGahn is a former FEC commissioner, nominated by George W. Bush in 2008 and confirmed by the Senate for his six year term.  He was elected FEC chairman soon after his confirmation.   Read all about it:   Here is a  beautiful example of Mr. McGahn’s legal prose, an opinion in a 2013 enforcement case ruling that Trump, Michael Cohen and the Trump organization did absolutely nothing wrong in connection with the 2012 presidential campaign.

As Wikipedia puts it: Due to multiple members resigning and no confirmed replacements, the commission lacks a quorum and cannot conduct most of its regulatory functions.^[5]

Before we get too excited, there is powerful criticism of the FEC, summarized here:

Critics of the FEC, including campaign finance reform supporters such as Common Cause and Democracy 21, have complained that it is a classic example of regulatory capture where it serves the interests of the ones it was intended to regulate. The FEC’s bipartisan structure, which was established by Congress, renders the agency “toothless.” Critics also claim that most FEC penalties for violating election law come well after the actual election in which they were committed. Additionally, some critics claim that the commissioners tend to act as an arm of the “regulated community” of parties, interest groups, and politicians when issuing rulings and writing regulations. Others point out, however, that the commissioners rarely divide evenly along partisan lines, and that the response time problem may be endemic to the enforcement procedures established by Congress. To complete steps necessary to resolve a complaint – including time for defendants to respond to the complaint, time to investigate and engage in legal analysis, and finally, where warranted, prosecution – necessarily takes far longer than the comparatively brief period of a political campaign.

My advice to anyone outraged by the kind of nonchalantly autocratic moves Mr. Trump routinely makes to weaken regulations, oversight and democracy itself, look away, vote for whoever the DNC puts up as a “centrist” presidential candidate.  Nothing you can do about any of it anyway, you powerless, worried citizens, short of doing the near impossible thing of figuring out how to join with others to organize and have a voice.  Just keep looking away.  You’ll hardly feel it when the bottom drops out from under us all.   The world is being destroyed anyway, and will be beyond salvaging shortly at the present rate of destruction, so no worries.

[1]  Just learned this great word from James Risen.  Shambolic:  chaotic, disorganized or mismanaged, (syn: muddled, confused, in total disarray).

[2] National disgrace Bill Barr (who recently joined the line of bagpipers at a police rally, so help me God) made the case against Trump in the Southern District go away, though Cohen, now in federal prison,  was reimbursed the $130,000 he paid porn-star Stormy Daniels in October 2016 (the campaign finance crime) and produced the $130,000 personal check Trump signed in his now familiar jagged Sharpie scrawl to reimburse him for the criminal act.  Oh, well.  That’s the Unitary Executive for you!

The hallmark of autocracy is unquestioning fealty to the unfailing wisdom and absolute power of the autocrat.   If the leader did it, it cannot be wrong.  If the leader said it, it must be the law, in a dictatorship.  That was the express credo and supreme legal principle of the Nazi regime, “the leader’s word is law” to wit:

After his party-line acquittal in the first trial in American history free of witnesses and evidence, the President’s impeachment “trial” in the Senate, the President exercised his legitimate power to punish the civil servants who had complied with legal subpoenas and testified honestly in the impeachment inquiry. 

The purge included the blameless twin brother of Alexander Vindman, one of the officials who gave sworn public testimony that directly contradicted the President’s claim that his 7/25 call to the new president of Ukraine was “perfect” (leaving aside a: what a “perfect call” even means and b: why the only record of the perfect call was hidden in a top secret government server until the Barr-squelched “credible”  and “urgent” Whistleblower complaint became known on September 9th).   

Although the vindictive purge by the President looked like the act of a petulant dictator, the firings were within the absolute right of every head of the Executive Branch, to purge the ranks of his enemies.   No reason to get all morally indignant about that.   Purges happen, the law says it’s fine, everyone in the Executive Branch works “at the pleasure of” their boss, the President, as we all know.

A few days later, late the other night, the President tweeted that the upcoming sentencing of his longtime ally Roger Stone was “horrible” and “very unfair”. 

All Stone had been convicted of, after all, was loyalty to his old friend while the sick and dangerous Democrats were getting a pass on all their many crimes.  Barr’s DOJ, by the way, is conducting criminal investigations into some of these sick bastards, including two sick and dangerous former FBI directors who refused to swear personal loyalty to the President, even when directly asked by the President [1].

Stone was only trying to help the President by lying under oath to federal investigators about his role in Russia’s sweeping and systematic attempt to help Trump eke out a 78,000 vote Electoral College win over an almost equally reviled opponent in the 2016 presidential race.  Where is the crime in that?!!!   Being a loyal friend is now a crime?!  Stone’s open defiance of the judge’s gag order?   He was nervous, because he’s INNOCENT!  What don’t you understand about “very unfair” and “horrible”?!

Asked yesterday, after the unabashedly corrupt Bagpiper Bill Barr’s Justice Department modified their own sentencing memo to the judge in the Stone case, based on the President’s sophisticated legal arguments in his “horrible” and “very unfair” tweet,  the President was asked if he has learned anything from impeachment.   Here is the question and the dumber than a pile of scats fiery red meat response:

Reporter:  What lesson did you learn from impeachment?

POTUS:  That the Democrats are crooked, they’ve got a lot of crooked things going.  That they’re vicious, that they shouldn’t have brought impeachment…

Reporter:   … anything about yourself?   

POTUS:   … and that my poll numbers are ten points higher because of fake news like NBC which reports the news very inaccurately, probably more inaccurately than CNN, if that’s possible, uh, MSDNC, and you’re MS… uh, and if you take a look at NBC… no, I think they’re among the most dishonest reporters of the news.

Case closed.  Trump 2020. 

The mass media (except for FOX, Breitbart, Der Sturmer and a few other reliable outlets) is the Enemy of the People, some very sick and dangerous people lying about truly great Americans while covering up the crimes of other sick and dangerous Democrat traitors!  It is finally almost time to turn the tables and bring justice to these sick and dangerous criminals.

Trump 2020.  Say it with me:  “Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft, yo.“

[1] The investigation into one, Andrew McCabe, was ended shortly after this post was written, with no finding of an actionable criminal charge.  

Terrible things happen regularly in our world, under the heading of “man’s inhumanity to man.”   At any given time one group of humans are catching hell from another.  For example, in 1921, a group of angry men in Tulsa, Oklahoma decided it was an intolerable outrage that another group of men, men who didn’t look like them, were prosperous while they themselves were struggling economically.   They went on a full-scale rampage, burning down a large section of Tulsa and killing an untold number of the other, hated, ethnic group.  After the pogrom, the survivors of that orgy of destruction, their former fine homes in ruins, were herded into an outdoor holding camp, presumably for their own protection from the still murderous mob.  

We don’t hear much about this particular racist massacre by a group of men who honestly believed they were superior to the people they were slaughtering, and fully justified in their violent actions.  Next year, when the centenary of the massive Tulsa Pogrom comes around, this particular little known slaughter will be placed before the public again. as if for the first time.

We can observe the sickening echoes of history, the sequences of unfolding events that “rhyme” with the most troubling episodes of the past.   We can see a familiar progression before every outpouring of mass rage:  legitimate grievance, harnessed and enflamed by finger-pointing demagogues, an “other” vilified (often as rapists and child murderers) and then, after sufficient time for this malignant brew to fully ferment, the chants begin, torches are lifted, men with guns ride to the rescue, the villains are brought to “justice,” swiftly, violently, without regard to the ordinary niceties for determining guilt or innocence.

It is a human instinct to look away from this kind of horror.   The impulse is understandable, even if it can also be fatal.   Historical comparisons are always slippery, often used to advance supremely idiotic arguments.   Certain things, however, always follow the same pattern.   In times of vast economic insecurity, for example, when massive transnational corporations employ armies of the world’s poorest, at slave wages, to maximize their profit margin, it is predictable that masses of their former decently paid workers, now without the prospect of employment for a fair wage, will rightfully feel betrayed and angry.  Angry people look for somebody to blame.  Demagogues direct their righteous rage towards some historically powerless group, the scoundrels who are to blame for this savage injustice.

It is predictable that when hundred year killer storms become the norm, instead of rare exceptions to the natural order — despite the robust right wing cries of hoax, fraud, lies, hysterical liberal alarmism — people affected by the storms will feel enormous desperation.  Every news report of a deadly tornado in an area that had never seen one, earthquakes in areas that had never had them, another large city flooded by a killer hurricane, landslides, wild fires, drought, rising sea levels causing floods … increases anxiety.  

It’s impossible to fully quell the thought, with the regular front page news of these now frequent natural disasters, that maybe this increasing natural destruction is not all a Chinese hoax invented by evil job-killing enemies who want to destroy our freedom.   The awful thought that maybe a hundred years of man’s wanton pollution has caused this scary change of the climate will creep in from time to time, especially after your own home is destroyed by an aggrieved Mother Nature.

Look away if you must.  Politics has become an ugly blood sport, the instinct to look away is stronger than it’s ever been, by deliberate design of the game.   As you turn your gaze inward to your own life, and making it as good as you can, in spite of the horrors around you, understand that only one side in the tribal wars has been actively and energetically organizing and preparing for this war for decades.  

Right now that side is winning bigly, while the other side cowers, afraid, torn by debate, many of its would be advocates turning away from “politics” and clinging to the things in life that make them feel most comfortable as the terrible rhymes of the worst episodes of history are jangling like ominous, maddeningly loud wind chimes agitated by a killing breeze.

Here in America only one side of our political divide, the extreme right, has organized a methodical long game to “right the scales” in the culture war.   One party now embraces views that, forty years ago, were the unthinkably paranoid, self-interested (and, frankly, racist) magical thinking of extreme fringe fanatics like The John Birch Society  [1].   The well-funded, smartly engineered campaign that created and funded influential “think tanks” to intellectually argue for their preferred public policies and shape national debate, endowed chairs at hundreds of universities for professors who espouse their liberty-loving views, founded, and funded, an influential national society of ambitious young lawyers and law students to ideologically indoctrinate and promote, through a fellow-traveler career ladder, future federal judges who will act as one to advance their agenda, given a case with the wiggle room to do so, funding national “grassroots” campaigns that appear on television to give the appearance of a massive, spontaneous public outcry, really has no analogue on the left. 

The protection of vast financial privilege, inequalities of wealth and grotesquely unequal chances for life or dignity, has long been the project of the privileged.  There is nothing mysterious about this; you or I, if we were cynics, would probably do the same, under these conditions.   If you stand to inherit a billion dollars from the family trust, and the government seeks to claim half of that in a punitive Death Tax, you will donate however many millions you are required to kick in for the cause of keeping it all.

Liberty, in fact, according to this orthodoxy, demands that the government not be allowed to coerce its citizens or unfairly confiscate the rightful property of  citizens.    An army of desperate poor people will be assembled to stand on the mall in Washington D.C. and every other major city and, in one voice, rail against this vicious government intrusion on human freedom!   Give ’em each fifty bucks and a free lunch, pay an additional ten if they make their own signs.   Why not?   That’s democracy in action, after all.   USA!  USA!!!!

The radical right has played a clever long game, learning from its mistakes, tweaking the program like a skilled engineer does to fix bugs in it.  It doesn’t hurt that they have unlimited money to deploy in sustaining their ever more effective long game.  Every beneficiary of the tangible privileges accorded to wealthy followers of the ideology will gladly kick in to advance the agenda for her own children and the children of her children’s children.   This is simply human nature, which you are free to judge, but powerless to do anything about.  

On the progressive side, historically, and presently, we tend to argue from entrenched positions — incremental change advocates (the practical art of the possible) versus institutional change advocates (justice delayed is justice denied).  We have moderates, urging us to not attempt to frontally attack long-time institutional injustices.   We have liberals, telling us that certain intolerable social evils should be reformed, must be reformed, to the extent possible in our divided political culture,  but that it may take a generation or two, or perhaps, as our recent history shows, a century or more.  

We have a few public radicals on the organized left, pointing out, correctly in my view, that the long slide toward autocracy (and bear in mind, the wealthy architects of the right wing revolution, in their hearts, prize their own liberty to be free of social coercion of any kind above everything else– autocracy for all!) cannot be countered with half measures.  We are fighting unscrupulous reactionary radicals, controlling untold wealth, who are busily spending to entrench themselves in permanent power, and only an equal and opposing energy, organizing and willingness to fight can make any difference.

The dilemma in a nation trained from birth to be pliant consumers — if you are appalled by the rapid advance of an extreme right wing agenda, there is really no place you can visit today, and directly participate to fight, that compares to any of the effective and massively well-funded one-stop shops of the formerly radical right.   If you are a young Libertarian, there is an easily findable career network and ready funding, from a variety of sources, for your liberty-enhancing ideas and a group of likeminded idealists ready to welcome you to their ranks.   Young leftists?  Good luck to you finding an organization to work with, finding people to organize, strategize and march with, in your city or town.

So, to the traumatized people of good conscience I know, I understand 100% your revulsion, and the reason you turn away from the ugly spectacle as our nation drops even the pretense of democracy.   It is painful and scary to witness, and a feeling of helpless anger is difficult to sit with.   There are wonderful entertainments to take our minds off this unsettling state of affairs, a host of diverting and excellent, healthy things to do– rather than watch in horror as the dark clouds of autocracy blot out all hopes of the light ever returning.   I get it, absolutely.   

And I will do my best to console you, sickeningly insistent realist (or unhinged, overwrought imaginer) that I am, in the cattle car, on our trip toward the relocation center.   At that point it will be senselessly cruel to remind anyone that all evil needs to flourish is for people of good conscience to look away, to do nothing.   How were you to really know how bad it was actually getting?   The New York Times was not freaking out, that much.

And, more to the point, it is not as if it was our children, or the children of anyone we know, who were snatched from their mothers’ arms and lost in a system of cages spread across many states, in the name of enthusiastically chanting crowds, for the profit of politically connected entrepreneurs who, flushed with a love of liberty, increased their bottom line bigly with government contracts to house these miserable sons and daughters of rapists and drug dealers.  

Do you think that on our way to the retraining center I would be crass enough to reproach anyone for their natural turning away from horror?   Not at all.   You won’t hear a word of reproach from me.  Why would you?

[1]  One of these wingnuts, the wildly influential, opiate-addled Rush Limbaugh, was decorated with the nation’s highest medal for a civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, hung around his neck by First Lady Melania.   Why not?   Rush was one of the pioneers of this brutal new politics, and one of the most successful promoters of ideas previously considered too insane to publicly advocate.  Without Limbaugh, you don’t get to Trump.   A grateful president acknowledges his debt, without getting too close to Rush, whose late stage cancer might be contagious, after all.  Wind farms also produce cancer, a shit ton of cancer, people are saying.  You can’t be too careful, if you want to live to see the full ripening of your movement towards absolute liberty from government coercion.