BACK FROM PURGATORY

I spent yesterday in computer hell. At 6:30 AM I tried to check in on a live cam and other streaming sites that I enjoy and discover that I was getting nothing but the sound and a green screen. Somehow I found my way to a company promising to help me whose tech experts are apparently located in Manila. Four hours and too much money later the problem was solved. The techie who helped me kindly showed me how it was to be fixed. It turned out that it required four clicks and about 20 seconds to do the job. Now, along the way he cleaned up my computer, deleted lots of temporary files, and even got rid of a Trojan file that promised real trouble, but still – – –

 

Wrung through and beaten down, I went on Google Chrome to check several of my favorite sites. No problem. Then I switched to Microsoft Edge and the problem reappeared, but this time I was ready for it and with four clicks I fixed it! I am now prepared to rent out my new gained expertise at reasonable rates. :-)

 

As for the rest of the world, there is a silver lining in the electoral hell we are now going through. Seemingly forever, Americans have told themselves a fable about how exceptional a country we are. We annually put out lists of countries that have failed to live up to our standard of democratic politics, we recruit young people to go around the world showing the benighted peoples of Third World countries how to be democracies. It is no good for left-wing scholars, among whom I am one, to publish books showing that this fable of exceptionalism conceals an ugly truth (see chapters two and three of my book Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.) But a wannabe autocrat, a cooperative Republican Party, and a royally screwed up election have together done the job quite nicely. It will be a while before Americans have the chutzpah to claim that they are a city upon a hill, the only nation created on the idea of freedom, a beacon to the world, etc. etc. etc. Perhaps the Congress could establish an annual prize for the country whose politics most closely resemble our own – they could call it the Donald J Trump Prize. 

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS BECOME A DEATH CULT

I assume by now everyone has seen or heard this extraordinary description by a nurse of her experiences with desperately ill patients who believe that COVID is a hoax and refuse to accept the proposition that that is what is killing them even as they lie in an emergency ward close to death. I do not think I have ever heard anything quite like this.

OK I HAVE DECIDED

Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions. If we put them all together, they would make a splendid first two years of an undergraduate education, or maybe a graduate education. I have decided on three books:

(Whoops!  He reads my blog.  I have deleted the titles to keep him surprised.)

The third is a bit of a stretch but he will be the only person in the world with an autographed copy and one of the very few people actually to read it, so why not? If I live long enough, I can give him one of my books each year and that should last me for birthday presents until he graduates from college.

His father has written a number of books about chess and I assume that he has copies of those. I hope he has watched all seven parts of The Queen's Gambit, in the last episode of which one of his father's games is featured.

Now all I need is Christmas present suggestions for Samuel and Athena from their mother. Serious business being a grandfather.

I NEED HELP

My 14-year-old grandson, Samuel, has a birthday coming up. He has become intensely interested in politics, thanks to the presidential campaign, and his mother, Diana, says he would enjoy books about American electoral politics. I need some suggestions. I am looking for books with lots of charts, tables, pictures, stories, and the like, informative and somewhat beyond his chronological age but not the sorts of deep dives that you or I might enjoy.

Does anybody have any suggestions? Perhaps I could find several books like that and add to it Howard Zinn's classic work, A People's History of the United States.

I have already given him in previous years my textbook, About Philosophy, and also In Defense of Anarchism and he has read both!

MORE THOUGHTS

Thank you all for your thoughtful and well-argued responses to my question. After reflecting on what you have said, let me try to explain why I am inclined to come down on the side of not launching federal prosecutions of Trump. I say “inclined” in order to convey that I am still quite torn on this matter.

 

Looking back on my long life, I find that during those years there are a number of presidents for the post – presidential prosecution of whom I could make a good argument. I have been alive during the presidencies of 14 men starting with Roosevelt and ending with Trump. Far and away the most reckless, dangerous, and hence perhaps most worthy of prosecution was Kennedy (although, of course, his assassination made the question moot.) Alone among the 14, Kennedy brought us to the brink of a civilization annihilating nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It was also Kennedy and his vice president LBJ who took us into the Vietnam war. George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq war, a succession of presidents carried out or did not put an end to the practice of “rendition,” which is to say the outsourcing of torture. And so on and on.

 

None of these actions was illegal, at least as defined by the Constitution. All of them were arguably within the purview of the powers of the presidency. By comparison, the illegal actions of Nixon and Trump and the sexual dalliances of Clinton are really quite minor. Trump is a grifter, a crook, and a cheap one at that. His crimes have all been out in the open and cheered on by perhaps 40% or more of the American electorate. I sing myself to sleep at night imagining the entire Trump family reduced to pauperism and forced to spend their lives searching for the parents of the children they turned into orphans. But that is neither here nor there.

 

To some extent, my response to the question I posed depends on the outcome of the Georgia senatorial runoff elections. If the Democrats win both, there is the possibility of some rapid, major, and extremely beneficial domestic legislation which would help the desperate circumstances of scores of millions of Americans. A prosecution of Trump would steal all of the time and attention from that legislation and I do not think would be worth the satisfaction of seeing Trump brought low. But if we lose one or both of those runoff elections, then regardless of good old Joe, virtually nothing will get done for at least the first two years of his presidency and in that case perhaps it would be just as well to spend some time and political capital going after the Trumps and their henchmen (or perhaps I should say henchpeople, since when it comes to corrupting and debasing the already corrupt and debased, Trump is an equal opportunity villain.)

 

Those are my thoughts at the moment. But if the comments section to this blog continues at its current level of intelligence and thoughtfulness I may find myself changing my mind. Thank you all again.

A QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION

I would like to pose a question for discussion about which I am genuinely torn but I will warn you, if you cannot discuss this question without attacking one another’s character, I will simply delete the entire post with the comment train and move on. I spent some time deleting comments this morning and it is just too exhausting.

 

The question is this: should the Atty. Gen. of the United States in the Biden administration investigate the behavior of Donald Trump while he was in office and if, as I suspect, he or she finds clear evidence of violations of law should charges be brought against Trump?

 

Why am I torn? Because the tradition of a peaceful transfer of presidential authority is extraordinarily valuable. It is now under violent assault by Republicans and, alas, by tens of millions of Americans as well. Once that tradition is violated, I do not think it can be reestablished. At some time in the future, perhaps in only four years, Republicans will retake the presidency and if Trump has been brought to justice by the Biden Atty. Gen., it is an absolute certainty that the next Republican president will try to do the same to Biden. And then we have a Banana Republic.

 

I do not think these considerations weigh at all against Attorneys General bringing charges against Trump and his company for violations of state law.

 

One might argue that we already live in a Banana Republic and have done so for the past 70 years. I am quite sympathetic to that view. That is why I am torn.

 

Fiat Justitia Ruat Coelum?

A REPLY TO COMMENTS

Thank you all for a vigorous and many sided debate responding to the article I linked to posted on The Daily Kos.  I should like to respond to some of your comments and also call attention to an aspect of the essay that did not receive much attention in those comments but which struck me very powerfully. Before I begin, a word about the term “deplorables.” I entirely agree that it is not a useful analytical term, besides being politically toxic. Mind you, I find a great many people in American politics deplorable. I find Rand Paul deplorable, I find Bill Clinton deplorable, Lord knows I deplore Susan Collins, indeed I think it is fair to say that I find the entire Republican senatorial and congressional delegation deplorable and in addition find large chunks of the Democratic senatorial and congressional delegation deplorable. I bow to no one in the depths of my deploring, but that is not much use in trying to understand the world. Some of the very greatest social theory of the second half of the 20^th century was written by émigré German theorists desperately trying to understand Hitler’s appeal to the German people, but although out of that grew the concept of the Authoritarian Personality and also the concepts of repressive toleration and the banality of evil, I do not recall Adorno or Horkheimer or Marcuse or Arendt calling anyone deplorable. So let us agree to set that term aside.

 

I think what Molitsos was most struck by, and what has impressed me so powerfully, was the sheer size of the turnout. In 2016, rounding off the numbers a bit, Clinton got 66 million votes and Trump got 63 million votes. In 2020, at least so far as the counting has gone thus far, Trump got 10 million more votes than he did four years ago and this is in the midst of a pandemic. This leads Molitsos to say “Trump is likely the single greatest campaigner in modern presidential history.”

 

He neglects to point out that Biden got 13 million more votes than Clinton did in 2016! Now no matter how much you like old Joe, no one can say that he ran a dynamic campaign from his basement, appropriately masked and distanced. Everything I have read suggests that Trump not only was capable of pulling out 10 million extra supporters, he also succeeded in pulling out 13 million extra opponents. I think he really does have a claim on being “the single greatest campaigner in modern presidential history,” although not quite in the fashion he might have desired.

 

The string of failures of Republican candidates in the bye elections of 2017 and 2019 and in the midterm elections of 2020, in all of which Trump campaigned vigorously for candidates other than himself, holds out some measure of hope, most immediately for the runoff elections in Georgia in early January. But the dramatic swing of traditionally Republican women against Trump is ominous, because it suggests that when he is not on the ballot they will revert to the Republican Party, leaving Democrats gasping for air.

 

Far and away the most faithful supporters of the Democratic Party, demographically speaking, are of course black women, who have good reason to claim that they carried the party to victory on their backs. Since black Americans are far more economically disadvantaged than white Americans, and since they are less likely to be college graduates than white Americans, it is difficult to explain the electoral choices of white Americans as governed primarily by economic desire or resentment of college educated elites. Surely, fear of losing the cultural, structural, and economic advantages of being white is playing a large role in political choices. This is an old story in America, going back to before the Civil War and continuing on to the present day.

 

Lest I end this post on a down note, let me say that the appearance of two extremely promising vaccine candidates encourages me to believe that I shall be able to travel back to Paris by next summer. Gather ye rosebuds where ye may, as someone once said.