In a shakeup by President Trump, top White House political strategist Steve Bannon has been removed from the National Security Council’s principals committee, which is comprised of top military service chiefs and intelligence agency heads. Bannon, who never should have been on the committee in the first place, was removed via an executive order that restored the traditional White House balance of keeping political appointees out of the military and intelligence chain of command.
The decision suggests that Bannon’s still-substantial power in the White House is being restrained and limited—though public statements by Bannon and the White House are offering other excuses. Bannon, the former executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News, was elevated by Trump to the principals committee at the start of his presidency. The move was sharply criticized by Congress and foreign policy experts.
The decision was made by Trump’s new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an unnamed White House official. Bannon was put on the principals committee—where he never attended a meeting—in part to watch Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has since left in disgrace, Bloomberg reported, also citing an unnamed White House official.
In a statement reported by the Journal, Bannon reverted to his Breitbart conspiracy theory mode, predictably blaming not only the Obama administration for his ouster, but pointing fingers at Susan Rice, the latest Obama administration figure the far-right is seeking to ensnare in its change-the-topic defense of Trump’s campaign contacts with Russia. “Susan Rice operationalized the NSC during the last administration,” Bannon’s statement said. “I was put on to ensure that it was de-operationalized. General McMaster has returned the NSC to its proper function.”
What this means is that the so-called deep state, or Washington institutions that endure throughout changes of administrations, like the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, are reasserting their power by pushing political operatives like Bannon back into a more limited sphere of influence. It means he will not have equal say in military and intelligence agency analysis and decision-making.
An analogy is haunting the United States – the analogy of fascism. It is virtually impossible (outside certain parts of the Right-wing itself) to try to understand the resurgent Right without hearing it described as – or compared with – 20th-century interwar fascism. Like fascism, the resurgent Right is irrational, close-minded, violent and racist. So goes the analogy, and there’s truth to it. But fascism did not become powerful simply by appealing to citizens’ darkest instincts. Fascism also, crucially, spoke to the social and psychological needs of citizens to be protected from the ravages of capitalism at a time when other political actors were offering little help.
The origins of fascism lay in a promise to protect people. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rush of globalisation destroyed communities, professions and cultural norms while generating a wave of immigration. Right-wing nationalist movements promising to protect people from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets arose, and frightened, disoriented and displaced people responded. These early fascist movements disrupted political life in some countries, but they percolated along at a relatively low simmer until the Second World War.
The First World War had devastated Europe, killing 16 million people, maiming another 20 million, crushing economies and sowing turmoil. In Italy, for example, the postwar period saw high inflation and unemployment, as well as strikes, factory occupations, land seizures and other forms of social unrest and violence. The Liberal Italian governments of the postwar era failed to adequately address these problems. The Liberals’ constituencies – businessmen, landowners, members of the middle class – abandoned them. The country’s two largest opposition parties – the socialist PSI and the Catholic PPI – also offered little effective redress to these basic social problems.
Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (PNF) stepped into the breach, taking advantage of the failure or ineffectiveness of existing institutions, parties and elites, and offering a mixture of ‘national’ and ‘social’ policies. Fascists promised to foster national unity, prioritise the interests of the nation above those of any particular group, and promote Italy’s stature internationally. The fascists also appealed to Italians’ desire for social security, solidarity and protection from capitalist crises. They promised therefore to restore order, protect private property and promote prosperity but also to shield society from economic downturns and disruption. Fascists stressed that wealth entailed responsibilities as well as privileges, and should be administered for the benefits of the nation.
These appeals enabled the fascists to garner support from almost all socioeconomic groups. Italy was a young country (formed in the 1860s), plagued by deep regional and social divisions. By claiming to serve the best interests of the entire national community, it was in fact the fascists who became Italy’s first true ‘people’s party’.
After coming to power, the Italian fascists created recreational circles, student and youth groups, sports and excursion activities. These organisations all furthered the fascists’ goals of fostering a truly national community. The desire to strengthen (a fascist) national identity also compelled the regime to extraordinary cultural measures. They promoted striking public architecture, art exhibitions, and film and radio productions. The regime intervened extensively in the economy. As one fascist put it: ‘There cannot be any single economic interests which are above the general economic interests of the state, no individual, economic initiatives which do not fall under the supervision and regulation of the state, no relationships of the various classes of the nation which are not the concern of the state.’ Such policies kept fascism popular until the late 1930s, when Mussolini threw his lot in with Hitler. It was only the country’s involvement in the Second World War, and the Italian regime’s turn to a more overtly ‘racialist’ understanding of fascism, that began to make Italian fascism unpopular.
Italian fascism differed from its German counterpart in important ways. Most notably, perhaps, anti-Semitism and racism were more innate in the German version. But Italian and German fascism also shared important similarities. Like Italy, Germany was a ‘new’ nation (formed in 1871) plagued by deep divisions. After the First World War, Germany had found itself saddled with punitive peace terms. During the 1920s, it experienced violent uprisings, political assassinations, foreign invasion and a notorious Great Inflation. Then the Great Depression hit, causing immense suffering in Germany. The response of the government, and other political actors, however, must also be remembered. For different reasons, both the era’s conservative governments and their socialist opponents primarily favoured austerity as a response to the crisis. Thus came a golden opportunity for fascism.
Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) promised to serve the entire German people, but the German fascist vision of ‘the people’ did not include Jews and other ‘undesirables’. They promised to create a ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) that would overcome the country’s divisions. The fascists also pledged to fight the Depression and contrasted its activism on behalf of the people’s welfare with the meekness and austerity of the government and the socialists. By the 1932 elections, these appeals to protect the German people helped the Nazis become the largest political party, and the one with the broadest socioeconomic base.
When, in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis quickly began work-creation and infrastructure programmes. They exhorted business to take on workers, and doled out credit. Germany’s economy rebounded and unemployment figures improved dramatically: German unemployment fell from almost 6 million in early 1933 to 2.4 million by the end of 1934; by 1938, Germany essentially enjoyed full employment. By the end of the 1930s, the government was controlling decisions about economic production, investment, wages and prices. Public spending was growing spectacularly.
Nazi Germany remained capitalist. But it had also undertaken state intervention in the economy unprecedented in capitalist societies. The Nazis also supported an extensive welfare state (of course, for ‘ethnically pure’ Germans). It included free higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance and an array of publically supported entertainment and vacation options. All spheres of life, economy included, had to be subordinated to the ‘national interest’ (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz), and the fascist commitment to foster social equality and mobility. Radical meritocratic reforms are not usually thought of as signature Nazi measures, but, as Hitler once noted, the Third Reich has ‘opened the way for every qualified individual – whatever his origins – to reach the top if he is qualified, dynamic, industrious and resolute’.
Largely for these reasons, up till 1939, most Germans’ experience with the Nazi regime was probably positive. The Nazis had seemingly conquered the Depression and restored economic and political stability. As long as they could prove their ethnic ‘purity’ and stayed away from overt shows of disloyalty, Germans typically experienced National Socialism not as a tyranny and terror, but as a regime of social reform and warmth.
There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism, much less ethnic cleansing, but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem. In response to the horror of fascism, in part, New Deal Democrats in the United States, and social democratic parties in Europe, also moved to re-negotiate the social contract. They promised citizens that they would control capitalism and provide social welfare policies and undertake other measures to strengthen national solidarity – but without the loss of freedom and democracy that fascism entailed.
The lesson for the present is clear: you can’t beat something with nothing. If other political actors don’t come up with more compelling solutions to the problems of capitalism, the popular appeal of the resurgent Right-wing will continue. And then the analogy with fascism and democratic collapse of the interwar years might prove even more relevant than it is now.
By Sheri Berman, professor of political science at Barnard College in New York. Her book Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Much media notice is likely to be taken this spring of the fact that a hundred years ago the US declared war on Germany, initiating for the first time ever American participation in a military conflict on European soil. The unprecedented nature of this “great departure” will surely be commented upon. But it is unlikely that many observers will venture beyond what for a long time has been the standard explanation of that involvement. An opportunity for a clearer understanding of the emergence of the US as a world power in the twentieth century will thus be missed.
We are usually told that US involvement in the Great War can be explained quite simply. Perhaps not surprisingly the prevailing account fits into a broader, widely accepted and promoted narrative about the US role generally in the modern world. Foreign evils are the root of the matter, and they require that the “indispensable nation” make the world, safe, free, and democratic. In 1917, Germany, by its aggressive use of u-boats to blockade Britain and its allies, forced the US to abandon its neutrality. An idealistic president, Woodrow Wilson, responded by rallying Americans behind a crusade intended not only to punish Berlin, but to save the world from ever having to endure war again.
But this explanation is grossly inadequate. To understand what did happen, it helps to keep in mind that American leaders had come, by 1900, well before the war erupted in Europe in 1914, to hold decided views about their nation’s future role in the world. Inspired especially by the stupendous economic growth that America was experiencing, they believed that in the coming decades the US could ascend to a position of international importance comparable to, if not eclipsing, that played by Britain in the nineteenth century. At the same time they believed that the continuance of the kind of international order that London had presided over was vital to their success. They were alarmed by intensifying great power rivalry that might threaten that order and were especially anxious about changes to the political boundaries and commercial frameworks that prevailed throughout Latin America and East Asia. It was believed that both of those vast, underdeveloped regions would see the ascendance of US influence and trade. Out of this concern there emerged the two hallmark foreign policies of America in this period: the (revitalized) Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Policy.
Great power relations increasingly seemed to require attention as well. While Britain was regarded as a rival, many of its policies were seen as working to US advantage. As a result, the two governments drew closer. And, Washington also began to work with London to promote mechanisms for the settlement of international disputes, war being seen as a threat to the status quo.
From beginning to end, the official US response to the Great War was dominated by the goal of trying to restore and then put on a more secure foundation the kind of international order American policy makers wanted. Ideologically, they assured themselves that this was a quest in the interest not only of all Americans, but of the entire world. The globe’s most unselfish and responsible statesmen were simply working to ensure that the world would be set up the way it was supposed to be, with (in their racialist thinking) the most adult and civilized people of humanity (themselves) leading the rest toward progress.
American involvement in the Great War began right away in 1914 when the war broke out. The Wilson administration wanted the conflict composed, but for the president and his chief adviser, Col. Edward M. House, peace was not an end in itself. It mattered greatly that Germany not undermine Britain and that it be taught a lesson. It was also vital that the settlement ensure against another such upheaval. Toward these ends, the US promoted itself as the only suitable mediator of the conflict and tried to position itself for a place at the peace table. Before the war even began the administration had already floated a rough plan for stabilization. The centerpiece of the plan entailed the US and like-minded big powers coming together to uphold the status quo against potential challengers like Russia and Japan, as well as cooperatively overseeing the future of what Col. House called the earth’s “waste places,” the underdeveloped world. This plan was in fact one of the precursors of Wilson’s League of Nations.
When the war began Wilson declared that the United States would steer a neutral path, and it was certainly his preference to stay clear of the fighting. But in the end his attachment to a particular vision for America’s role in the twentieth century world mattered more than peace. Whatever he said in public, he repeatedly tilted toward Britain and its allies, not only because he did not want them to lose, but also because he wanted to make sure that the US would have a leading role (along with Britain) in arranging the postwar world. Thus he acquiesced in Britain’s sweeping maritime measures, which involved the use of its navy and mines to destroy all of Germany’s trade. And House secretly offered to coordinate his peace efforts with London. The same considerations were key to the quite different posture that Wilson assumed toward Germany’s use of submarines. The president threatened war unless Berlin adhered to his views as to how it might behave on the high seas.
Wilson continued to try to get the two sides to accept his vision of a proper settlement. But both remained uncooperative. His hope of America becoming a world power without participation in the Great War’s fighting thus in actuality was made hostage to the question of how long Berlin would agree to respect Wilson’s red lines. That question would be answered in 1917, just months after he had won reelection as president behind the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”
Robert E. Hannigan is Scholar in Residence in the Department of History of Suffolk University. He is the author of The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-24 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Some of the latest hooey uttered by White House press secretary Sean Spicer — the man from whom a seemingly bottomless wellspring of hooey flows — was his pronouncement the other day that having so many fabulously wealthy men and women working in the White House is a good and wondrous thing.
“The president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful by this country, and have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a lot of assets,” Spicer said.
“… People are often told they have to sell an asset or get rid of something to come serve in the government. And there’s a lot of people that have done a lot to come into this administration to give back, that have been inspired by the president’s victory and the president’s agenda to move the country forward.”
You bet, Sean. In a world of haughty ideals and self-professed high purpose, some would call this notion noblesse oblige — that with wealth and power comes social responsibility; to whom much is given, much is expected, etc. And so it should be. But in Donald Trump’s world, snagging a White House job doubtless will be a solid gold vehicle for using wealth and power to generate more wealth and power for yourself and others, taking optimal advantage of an opportunity handed you by the rich guy who, thanks to the deficiencies of the Electoral College, has landed in the most lucrative pot of jam ever.
And while the new hires may have to hew closer to the conflict-of-interest rules than the boss — did you see the latest about how Trump can keep siphoning profits from his businesses even though he’s supposed to be hands off? — there will be plenty of opportunities to take advantage.
In other words, high-ranking White House employee, those assets that you may or may not have set aside for the duration are likely to be worth a lot more when you and this president are done, even though you will have left behind quite a trail of broken dreams and shattered lives among the less favored of us.
The financial disclosure forms from about 180 staffers that begrudgingly were released by the White House late last week — a Friday night news dump designed to be as cumbersome for the press as possible — revealed, as The Washington Post reported, that Trump, “who campaigned as a champion of the working class, has surrounded himself with a circle of wealthy advisers.
“The disclosures showed that Trump’s top aides have generated millions of dollars from Wall Street, Hollywood, real estate and the media, holding a slew of investments that intensify the administration’s challenge in navigating potential intersections between officials’ personal finances and their policymaking roles.”
Just 27 of these folks have a combined worth of $2.3 billion, and that is a sum, according to a different Washington Post article, greater than what all the households in each of 80 percent of America’s counties make in a year — 86 percent when it comes to the counties that voted for Trump. Per the Post, in a classic bit of understatement, “… This reinforces the disconnect between the Trump team and the voters Trump likes to highlight.”
That would include such team players as chief economic adviser and Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn, worth between $253 million and $611 million; Reed Cordish, the Maryland real estate guy now in charge of technology initiatives, worth at least $197 million; and of course, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, the person known around these parts as The Son-in-Law Also Rises.
Ivanka and Jared, a man whose burgeoning portfolio of responsibilities now covers everything from the opioid epidemic and peace in the Middle East to possibly, I pray, throwing himself between his father-in-law and the nuclear football, are worth as much as $740 million. Eric Lipton and Jesse Drucker at The New York Times write:
“Mr. Kushner did resign from more than 200 positions in the partnerships and limited liability companies that make up the family-run multibillion-dollar real estate business. But the financial disclosure report shows that Mr. Kushner will remain a beneficiary of most of those same entities.”
And that’s a big problem, “perilous legal and ethical ground,” according to experts interviewed by the Times. As real estate investors, the Kushner family attracts money from China, Russia, the Middle East and other places where American foreign policy has an interest. What’s more, the banks with which the Kushners deal are regulated by governments here and abroad and stand to gain from Trump pledges to roll back the Dodd-Frank reforms, among others. Some, such as Israel’s Bank Hapoalim, are under federal investigation. The tax code reform that Trump claims to be a high priority will impact the Kushners and their financial interests, too.
One other thing. Looking at the disclosure forms, what’s also striking is how many of the fortunate now staking their claims at the executive mansion made much of their money not via inheritance or banks or industry but in the world of political consulting, a field that has exploded with the infusion of millions now made possible by Citizens United and other court decisions. Those rulings have helped open a fire hose of dark money, much of it from the right — especially the Koch brothers and the Mercers, father and daughter — and it floods the electoral landscape with a deluge of cant and propaganda.
Presidential adviser and mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and consultant, has assets valued at between $11 million and more than $44 million. Last year she made $842,614 from a reported 75 sources of income, including Tea Party Patriots and the Judicial Crisis Network, which has been bankrolling a big media campaign in support of Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch.
And while Steve Bannon made his initial fortune in international investment banking (including Goldman Sachs), an irony given his current anti-globalist nationalism and economic populism, in recent years he has made a lot of his cash from ventures in right-wing publishing (Breitbart), filmmaking, analysis and consulting. His assets are now listed as between $13 million and $56 million.
“While most press reports have focused on the potential for financial conflicts of interest posed by the multibillions in holdings by numerous White House officials, the personal financial statements show how key political advisers became rich via their extreme anti-government activism.”
The profit opportunities are rife, deeply tempting and not just for Trump’s nearest and dearest. This wealthiest administration in American history is going to make for its selected few a bundle of a size unimaginable to the rest of us — yet we’re the ones who will be paying the bill. And when this gang leaves their government jobs, they’ll be making even more, spinning through the revolving door back into the private sector, their worth enhanced by the time they’ve spent working for this mudslide of a president.
Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has said Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” is his favorite book. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA, cited Rand as a major inspiration. Before he withdrew his nomination, Trump’s pick to head the Labor Department, Andrew Puzder, revealed that he devotes much free time to reading Rand.
Such is the case with many other Trump advisers and allies: The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, famously made his staff members read Ayn Rand. Trump himself has said that he’s a “fan” of Rand and “identifies” with Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s novel, “The Fountainhead,” “an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because the builders did not precisely follow his blueprints.”
As a philosopher, I have often wondered at the remarkable endurance and popularity of Ayn Rand’s influence on American politics. Even by earlier standards, however, Rand’s dominance over the current administration looks especially strong.
What’s in common with Ayn Rand?
Recently, historian and Rand expert Jennifer Burns wrote how Rand’s sway over the Republican Party is diminishing. Burns says the promises of government largesse and economic nationalism under Trump would repel Rand.
That was before the president unveiled his proposed federal budget that greatly slashes nonmilitary government spending – and before Paul Ryan’s Obamacare reform, which promised to strip health coverage from 24 million low-income Americans and grant the rich a generous tax cut instead. Now, Trump looks to be zeroing in on a significant tax cut for the rich and corporations.
These all sound like measures Rand would enthusiastically support, in so far as they assist the capitalists and so-called job creators, instead of the poor.
Though the Trump administration looks quite steeped in Rand’s thought, there is one curious discrepancy. Ayn Rand exudes a robust elitism, unlike any I have observed elsewhere in the tomes of political philosophy. But this runs counter to the narrative of the Trump phenomenon: Central to the Trump’s ascendancy is a rejection of elites reigning from urban centers and the coasts, overrepresented at universities and in Hollywood, apparently.
Liberals despair over the fact that they are branded elitists, while, as former television host Jon Stewart put it, Republicans backed a man who takes every chance to tout his superiority, and lords over creation from a gilded penthouse apartment, in a skyscraper that bears his own name.
Clearly, liberals lost this rhetorical battle.
What is Ayn Rand’s philosophy?
How shall we make sense of the gross elitism at the heart of the Trump administration, embodied in its devotion to Ayn Rand – elitism that its supporters overlook or ignore, and happily ascribe to the left instead?
In this 1962 file photo Ayn Rand, Russian-born American novelist, is photographed in New York with Grand Central Terminal in the background.
AP Photo
Ayn Rand’s philosophy is quite straightforward. Rand sees the world divided into “makers” and “takers.” But, in her view, the real makers are a select few – a real elite, on whom we would do well to rely, and for whom we should clear the way, by reducing or removing taxes and government regulations, among other things.
Rand’s thought is intellectually digestible, unnuanced, easily translated into policy approaches and statements.
Small government is in order because it lets the great people soar to great heights, and they will drag the rest with them. Rand says we must ensure that “the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.”
Mitt Romney captured Rand’s philosophy well during the 2012 campaign when he spoke of the 47 percent of Americans who do not work, vote Democrat and are happy to be supported by hardworking, conservative Americans.
No sympathy for the poor
In laying out her dualistic vision of society, divided into good and evil, Rand’s language is often starker and harsher. In her 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” she says,
“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”
Rand’s is the opposite of a charitable view of humankind, and can, in fact, be quite cruel. Consider her attack on Pope Paul VI, who, in his 1967 encyclical Progressio Populorum, argued that the West has a duty to help developing nations, and called for its sympathy for the global poor.
Rand was appalled; instead of feeling sympathy for the poor, she says
“When [Western Man] discovered entire populations rotting alive in such conditions [in the developing world], is he not to acknowledge, with a burning stab of pride – or pride and gratitude – the achievements of his nation and his culture, of the men who created them and left him a nobler heritage to carry forward?”
Telling it like it is
Why doesn’t Rand’s elitism turn off Republican voters? – or turn them against their leaders who, apparently, ought to disdain lower and middle class folk? If anyone – like Trump – identifies with Rand’s protagonists, they must think themselves truly excellent, while the muddling masses, they are beyond hope.
Why hasn’t news of this disdain then trickled down to the voters yet?
The neoconservatives, who held sway under President George W. Bush, were also quite elitist, but figured out how to speak to the Republican base, in their language. Bush himself, despite his Andover-Yale upbringing, was lauded as “someone you could have a beer with.”
Trump has succeeded even better in this respect – he famously “tells it like it is,” his supporters like to say. Of course, as judged by fact-checkers, Trump’s relationship to the truth is embattled and tenuous; what his supporters seem to appreciate, rather, is his willingness to voice their suspicions and prejudices without worrying about recriminations of critics. Trump says things people are reluctant or shy to voice loudly – if at all.
Building one’s fortune
This gets us closer to what’s going on. Rand is decidedly cynical about the said masses: There is little point in preaching to them; they won’t change or improve, at least of their own accord; nor will they offer assistance to the capitalists. The masses just need to stay out of the way.
The principal virtue of a free market, Rand explains, is “that the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements…”
But they don’t lift the masses willingly or easily, she says: “While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority are free to demonstrate.”
Like Rand, her followers – who populate the Trump administration – are largely indifferent to the progress of the masses. They will let people be. Rand believes, quite simply, most people are hapless on their own, and we simply cannot expect much of them. There are only a few on whom we should pin our hopes; the rest are simply irrelevant. Which is why she complains about our tendency to give welfare to the needy. She says,
“The welfare and rights of the producers were not regarded as worthy of consideration or recognition. This is the most damning indictment of the present state of our culture.”
So, why do Republicans get away with eluding the title of elitist – despite their allegiance to Rand – while Democrats are stuck with this title?
I think part of the reason is that Democrats, among other things, are moralistic.
They are more optimistic about human nature – they are more optimistic about the capacity of humans to progress morally and live in harmony.
Thus, liberals judge: They call out our racism, our sexism, our xenophobia. They make people feel bad for harboring such prejudices, wittingly or not, and they warn us away from potentially offensive language, and phrases.
Many conservative opponents scorn liberals for their ill-founded naïve optimism. For in Rand’s world there is no hope for the vast majority of mankind. She heaps scorn on the poor billions, whom “civilized men” are prodded to help.
The best they can hope for is that they might be lucky enough to enjoy the riches produced by the real innovators, which might eventually trickle down to them in their misery.
To the extent that Trump and his colleagues embrace Rand’s thought, they must share or approach some of her cynicism.
The Los Angeles Times skewered President Donald Trump, the "Dishonest President," in an extraordinary, brilliantly written editorial on Sunday, calling him "untethered to reality."
The editors described Trump as "a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation." The editorial added: "nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck." Though there are many who expected a Trump disaster presidency, his actions so far would score quite high on the political Richter scale.
The paper lambasted Trump for just about everything he has done (or failed to do), but especially for peeling back President Obama's regulations aimed at reducing climate change, his crackdown on immigration and his revenge aimed at "sanctuary cities," and his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have had disastrous effects on millions.
The editorial expressed concern about fake news, lies and propaganda, asserting: "Whether it is the easily disprovable boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd or his unsubstantiated assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower, the new president regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction." The paper added that Trump urges his supporters to ignore fact-based evidence, science and what they read in the established media. The message from Trump is to reject long-term institutions like the press and the courts, in favor of ideology and conspiracy theory. This is a "recipe for a divided country," the newspaper asserted.
Trump has often expressed his distaste for the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now he has another major media enemy, this one in California, on the left coast, where Trump was crushed by Hillary Clinton. And the LA Times just got started on Sunday. There will be three more editorials in this series to be published under the heading, "The Problem with Trump."
The hard-edged editorial in the most prominent California newspaper highlights the vast chasm between people who live on the two coasts, where voters went for Hillary Clinton in huge majorities, and the South, Southwest and Midwest where voters decided that Trump best represented their interests.
As the New York Times reported, "Hillary Clinton... won California’s 55 electoral votes with 4,269,978 more votes than Donald J. Trump." Hillary Clinton won California by 30 points. Those pro-Trump voters believed Trump's promise about bringing back a romanticized past, where conservative Christians would regain their power, where the coal industry would return to its long-ago glory days as part of a large scale denial of climate change.
The Los Angeles Times, the largest newspaper in a city with large numbers of immigrants, a couple of hours away from the border with Mexico, showed its concern with Trump's immigration crackdown: "Trump’s cockamamie border wall, his impracticable campaign promise to deport all 11 million people living in the country illegally and his blithe disregard for the effect of such proposals on the U.S. relationship with Mexico turn a very bad policy into an appalling one."
The Times published a series of letters to the editor by irate Trump supporters, complaining that the newspaper has lost its objectivity—though this was an editorial, not an article. Other writers want the Times to give Donald Trump a chance, saying the editorial was hateful and disrespectful and claiming Trump is no less dishonest than his predecessor.
It’s time to separate Trump’s fake chaos from the real chaos he’s causing.
This week's hyperventilating news was filled with fake chaos. It’s like watching old reruns, where you know the character’s defects and wait for the punch lines. When Trump is in trouble, he blames everyone else. Hence, he tweeted that the House’s far-right Freedom Caucus will “hurt” the “entire Republican agenda” if they don’t get on board. Then he slapped the New York Times again, which has “gotten me wrong for two solid years,” ending with a threat to “Change libel laws?”
This is not chaos. This is flailing, for failing to pass anything in Congress. What Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan tried to do to Obamacare and to Medicaid was abhorrent for the pain it would have caused millions. No one saw the far right would kill it because it wasn’t destructive enough to government. But now, as the dust settles and the nation is reminded that Republicans face their own civil war, Trump’s screeching should be seen for what it is: more fake chaos than not.
While that GOP split will have real-life implications when the House gets some version of its act together, for now it’s thankfully Exhibit A for a do-nothing body. While it might be entertaining in a politically twisted way to see Trump squirm like an "Apprentice" contestant who has yet to quit or be fired, the chamber that’s done the real harm so far is the GOP-led Senate. They have rubber-stamped Trump’s top appointees and next week will show the country how far they will go, possibly by rigging the vote-counting rules to ram through a stolen Supreme Court seat.
That takes us to the real chaos. This is an important distinction. Americans who see Trump for the sociopath that he is, and see Republicans as a party driven by a catalog of other dysfunctions, need to hold on to this to preserve their sanity. The nation and the world in the Trump era are facing more chaos and becoming destabilized in numerous ways. It’s not all Trump’s fault, although his vanities, lack of political experience, cabinet picks and advisers, and policies are making lots of matters far worse than they need to be.
Here are a half-dozen developing ways we are experiencing an escalation of real chaos under Trump.
1. America’s Overseas Wars Are Growing
Trump’s proposed $54 billion increase in Pentagon spending for the next federal budget has yet to be debated in Congress, but the military under his watch “is deepening its involvement in a string of complex wars in the Middle East that lack clear endgames,” the New York Times reported Thursday, citing the impact on ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen of Trump’s vow to unshackle soldiers from Obama-era restraints. The report noted that “no one is planning for peace” and that Trump's “military-first approach [comes] even as he has proposed cuts in diplomatic spending.” As the region’s chaotic wars are expanding, the cost of crude oil, which translates into what’s paid at the pump for gasoline and heating oil, has begun rising.
2. Tillerson Tells Repressive Regimes to Ignore Human Rights
The State Department is abandoning its defense of human rights, the glue that attempts to hold civilization’s thin skin in place. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson removed the human rights restrictions that the Obama White House put on a $2.8 billion sale of fighter jets to Bahrain, where the U.S. has a major Persian Gulf base. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and other autocratic regimes will interpret that as a nod to repress dissidents and protesters, foreign policy experts say. Meanwhile at the UN on Wednesday, U.S. Envoy Nikki Haley attacked the UN human rights council as “so corrupt,” but gave no proof. Embracing militarism and dismissing restraint may please wartime profiteers, but it’s also a formula for more strife and chaos.
3. Splintering Alliances Bring More Volatile Global Era
This is not just Trump supporting Brexit, the departure of Great Britain, the continent’s second-largest economy, from the European Union. Brexit is indicative of the unraveling of the complex international system that has shaped the West since World War II. Trump’s signing this week of orders undoing Obama’s climate change policies, including steps to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement, signals more than an inward turning toward nationalism and self-interest. Trump is abdicating political and economic leadership and putting the nation in a position of responding to world events, not managing them to prevent crises. Thinking a bigger military is sufficient for American leadership in the 21st century is another invitation to a chaotic future.
4. Climate Denial Means Coast-to-Coast Troubles
Americans will soon know that the Trump’s administration’s willful ignorance on climate science, policies and government responses is not going to lead to bliss. When Trump allows outdated carbon-producing industries to make one last run at the bank, as his executive orders do for coal and domestic oil and gas production, he’s putting one industry ahead of the country in innumerable ways that can only backfire. Americans who live on the coasts, or whose livelihoods—like agriculture—are pegged to climate and science, will face more volatility. And that is looking with the most near-term lens. Ignoring planetary peril invites unthinkable chaos.
5. Immigration Crackdown and Growing Federal Police State
Trump’s war on America’s 11 million visa-less migrants keeps unfolding and inciting fears and chaos in immigrant communities and households across America. Unlike President Obama, whose administration cruelly deported millions but identified its targets, Trump has told federal police to go after anyone. The administration's latest responses are intended to sow fear by arresting migrant leaders in sanctuary communities and targeting ordinary people nationwide. Attorney General Sessions has upped the ante this week by threatening local police departments with revoking federal funds if they don’t join his deportation efforts. Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants who are victims of crime, domestic abuse or employer rip-offs have nowhere to turn, for fear of being held for deportation. These policies are upending millions of lives.
6. Outbursts of Hate, Racism, Misogyny by Trump Legions
Whether it’s Bill O’Reilly on Fox News making fun of an African-American congresswoman’s hair, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer scolding a female reporter who questioned his propagandistic claims, or a marked increase in hateful actions since the election, civility is ebbing in many public settings across America. In its place are brasher, more incendiary behaviors.
Paying the Price
The biggest current danger of the Trump administration is the deep chaos its appointees and their varied policies are setting the stage for, not the president's petty taunts and schoolyard incitements. Just as most Americans know we are living in a world of real and fake news, we need to distinguish between the real and fake chaos Trump and his team are inciting.
It’s another necessary survival skill in an era where Trump and the GOP are more enamored by destroying institutions and societal norms than modernizing or advancing them. The turn toward a more militant foreign policy and away from the daily tweet storms is a telling reminder. As we read the news, watch broadcasts and comment on social media, we need to separate Trump’s real chaos from the fake.
As House Republicans are considering another Obamacare repeal, they are being goaded by ideologues who haven’t learned much from last week’s failed attack on the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
“The resolve of our conference to repeal Obamacare and replace it has never been stronger,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., gamely told reporters early in the week that ended with President Trumpescalating a Twitter-based war of words with the far-right Freedom Caucus.
Beyond that spat between grown men acting like playground bullies, the Republicans pushing for another Obamacare repeal still don’t get it, or enough of them don’t, how gutting the ACA would unsettle large swaths of older voters in their red-state base, let alone the rest of America.
A midweek email blast commentary from The National Review’s Jim Geraghty typifies this blind spot.
As he parses House Speaker Paul Ryan’s performance, the focus of GOP infighting until Trump started tweeting about the Freedom Caucus, Geraghty draws on other right-wing pundits. Look at what they emphasize and ask yourself what’s missing.
Geraghty quotes, “my friend Kurt Schlichter: It’s the tactics that Ryan has botched; he’s shown no aptitude for the basic blocking and tackling of legislating and consistently falls back on the errors of the past.” Then he goes to “my friend Jonah Goldberg: On Saturday morning, Trump placed the blame squarely on the House Freedom Caucus, the 30-odd members of Congress who reportedly kept changing their demands.”
This post-mortem that builds toward the conclusion that good conservative ideas needed to be a repeal bill but weren’t. It suggests that what was skipped in the first round but could resurface in another try.
What’s missing from this appraisal? The answer is the real-life consequences that a free-market based hollowing out of the health care system will likely cause, especially the medical, financial and emotion impacts on older Americans.
Amazingly, a handful of red-state Republican-led legislatures and governors jump to that same conclusion.
The dust hadn’t even cleared from last Friday’s collapse of Ryan’s bill gutting Obamacare and Medicaid funding and a handful red states—the same states that sued to block Obamacare—suddenly embraced the ACA’s federally subsidized expansion of their Medicaid programs. This included Kansas, where the arch-rightwing governor is expected to leave for an overseas post, and Georgia, Idaho and Nebraska.
As more pragmatic stateside Republicans are seeing how Obamacare can help their lowest-income residents, the collapse of the House’s repeal effort has prompted the political left to rally around the health care reform they wanted all along—turning Medicare it into a federally based single-payer system.
Health care isn’t any issue. It is one-sixth of the economy. It affects the physical and fiscal health of millions of Americans. It’s strikes more immediately closer to home than the selection of the next U.S. Supreme Court justice, although a corporatist majority court is the reason why so much in America, including health care, is tilted in favor of big business.
It is remarkable to see House Republicans actually considering a new effort to overturn Obamacare. The National Review Geraghty even goaded the White House to draw up the bill—before Trump launched his Twitter attack on the Freedom Caucus.
"Nothing prevented Trump or his team from writing up their own legislation that would enact their own replacement for Obamacare. (Nothing still prevents them now!)," he wrote. "During the campaign, Trump promised he would repeal the law entirely, eliminate the individual mandate, permit the sale of health insurance across state lines, allow individuals to fully deduct health-insurance premium payments, require price transparency from all health-care providers and allow consumers access to imported, safe, and dependable drugs from overseas. The AHCA didn’t include most of that."
Democratic strategists have rued the exit from their party of older, mostly white baby boom voters in the past decade—people who voted for Bill Clinton in the 1990s but in recent elections were swept up by the Tea Party and Donald Trump’s nostalgic and white-centric hype. Now they see a way to reverse that.
“One of the key voting blocks Democrats will need to win the House and hold the line in the Senate is seniors,” Doug Thornell, a veteran Democratic strategist, earlier this week told The Hill. “Republicans are doing everything they can to help us with that effort.”
Are House Republicans really going to resurrect an Obamacare repeal? The Democrats will need all the help they can get to try to regain a House majority in 2018. Let’s see them try.
A prominent Cold War historian once insisted to me that McCarthyism had sharply limited reach, affecting only a handful of Americans. My uncle Walter (my mother’s much older brother) would have disagreed. He was of no obvious importance or prominence. Yet he and his family found they had been scrutinized, reported upon, and branded disloyal to their country. It is valuable, today, to remember the costs of government suspicion run amok ‒ the danger of “national security” giving cover to a police-state mentality.
Walter served on the front lines in WWII with the Army Signal Corps before pursuing an education through the GI Bill of Rights. He went to work producing electronic equipment for Columbia’s cyclotron lab. He also applied for a job with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). That in turn spurred a legally-mandated review of his “character, associations and loyalty.”
The result was one small episode in the 1950s Red Scare ‒ all-too-large for him and his family.
In July 1951, Walter was handed two pages of AEC accusations. Much attention focused on his parents, Israel and Fannie. Israel was a naive believer in Communist dogma, and a deluded admirer of an idealized Joseph Stalin. His sole outlet was the recorder’s post in a Jewish People’s Fraternal Order lodge, part of the larger International Workers Order (a Communist-leaning labor organization that provided insurance and workers’ benefits). Walter never shared his father’s passion for politics, or his attraction to Marxism. But he, too, had joined the JPFO (as he disclosed on his AEC questionnaire) to obtain health and life insurance. He left in 1947, since he no longer needed the insurance. Soon after, the AEC emphasized, the IWO was officially branded a subversive organization.
Walter and his family also registered with New York’s pro-union American Labor Party,1 which included conventional labor activists and Communists ‒ issues to which Walter paid little attention. The AEC, however, noted ominously that the ALP’s Manhattan and Brooklyn sections were said to be Communist controlled.
It was “reported” ‒ as a separate accusation ‒ that his father Isidor “has also been known as Israel.” “Israel,” redolent of Judaism and its presumed taint of leftist radicalism, was evidently felt to be worrisome in its own right ‒ particularly as a supposed “secret” identity. (Isidor was his name in English, Israel in Yiddish; as Walter would note in response, no “deception” was ever intended.) Walter’s sister Pauline and her husband Harry (secretary of Israel’s JPFO lodge) were accused of signing Communist Party nominating petitions.
Most frighteningly, the family learned they had been spied and informed upon. An unnamed source claimed to have seen the Communist Daily Worker and a “reportedly… pro-Communist” Yiddish paper in their apartment. It was further “reported” that in 1939 or 1940 his parents had “glorified and praised Russia,” that his mother had predicted Soviet conquest of America, and had boasted that “she and her husband had been ‘sent’ over here for a ‘reason’ which she refused to divulge.”
This letter instantly plunged the family into crisis. The details were kept from my mother, then eleven, but she could hardly escape the air of panic that gripped the small apartment. Fannie’s own childhood in Tsarist-ruled Vitebsk2 had been defined by fear. Not only did her family face anti-Semitic threats, they scrambled at any knock on the door to hide incriminating leftist books. Before she left for America in 1913, her father was chased down and killed by Tsarist troops; her younger brother was later gunned down during a Bolshevik demonstration. (Walter was named for them both ‒ a constant reminder.)3Though she sympathized with leftist politics, Fannie had a lifelong paranoia at drawing attention or expressing public opinions.
Now, not only had Israel’s minor leftist fraternal activities drawn government attention, they were being reported upon by their neighbors. Fannie and Walter were sure the woman living below (a “nasty buttinski,” my mother remembers) had rooted through their garbage for newspapers and invented the pro-Soviet boasts out of sheer malice. (There was further reason to feel besieged: Walter’s best buddy also applied for government work ‒ and was informed that his friends Walter, Pauline and Harry were suspected Communists.)
It took two days after the “bombshell” for Walter to “cool off” enough to prepare a densely typed rebuttal. He had joined the JPFO for insurance benefits ‒ and had left months before it was declared subversive; he acidly added that he had “no inside sources” for “advance information.” He was unaware the ALP had been declared subversive, but being rather apolitical beyond voting, had no contact with its offices; he disliked some of its public “antics,” but liked the other parties even less.
As to his parents’ Yiddish papers, Walter could not read Yiddish. He had seen the Daily Worker in their apartment “about twice in the past twelve years.” He had rejected its shallow dogma, preferring “to form my own opinions after having the facts.”
The bizarre claims about his parents’ words ‒ made secretly by witnesses they could not challenge ‒ particularly infuriated him. His mother, he fumed, was known for abhorrence of war; she deeply feared a US-Russian conflict, in which “no one would be the winner.” “As to this business of being ‘sent’ here for a ‘reason’: when was this supposed to have occurred?” His parents came to the US by 1916, “definitely before any communist regime existed in Russia” ‒ and had since been, respectively, a cobbler and a housewife.
His father did believe “that it is improper for one man to live off the back of another.” But “I am not my father’s keeper.” Walter himself opposed Communism, put the individual ahead of the state, and supported a free market. He intended to advance in the electronics industry.
He readily saw the insinuation: since his father was “a minor official in a small section of a Subversive Organization” (currently busy building an old-age home), Walter would hand him nuclear secrets, bound straight for the Russian embassy ‒ though Israel barely had a grade-school education, Walter himself was not a nuclear scientist (he only sought to make their electronics), and knew from his army service the importance of discretion. (The AEC never mentioned Walter’s honorable military service.) He resented the suggestion that he would divulge information to foreign powers: not only was he a loyal American, but enemy attack would “blow me and mine off the face of the planet.”
Most of all, Walter insisted on his family’s right to do as they pleased without it defining him. He drew a pointed and cutting parallel between his government’s implied demand ‒ that he renounce or betray his family if their views were out of favor ‒ and the Communist tyrannies he was tacitly accused of supporting: “I frown on the evil practice” in Russia and China, “and I frown on it here.”
After a hearing in October ‒ he was allowed a lawyer, but of course could not afford one ‒ Walter heard nothing until early 1953, when he was informed that the board4 had unanimously declared him a security risk: though he had left the JPFO, it was not due to dissatisfaction with its “political leanings or philosophy”; he had remained in the ALP, “commonly thought” to be under Communist control in New York City; and he refused to accept government rulings that such groups were subversive unless they committed openly subversive acts.
His parallel between Communist tyranny and demands that he renounce his family went entirely unnoticed. He was branded unreliable due to his “close association with members of your family” who remained in the JPFO and “who may have supported the Communist Party”; his “unwillingness to consider attempting to dissuade your family” from Communist opinions; and his insistence “that even if members of your family were Communist Party members, it would not be your responsibility.” The AEC conceded there was “insufficient evidence” that his parents or relations were Communist Party members (in fact there was none), but ALP membership was enough. And Walter “had the Daily Worker or Sunday Worker in your home.” (They did not say when, or how often.)
The AEC found “insufficient evidence” that Fannie had boasted of a secret Russian mission ‒ but, citing no source, they found it “probable” that she had declared conditions under the Soviets better than under the Tsar. Fannie knew far more of Tsarist conditions than the AEC ‒ but she still would never have volunteered such an opinion outside the family.
Walter was luckier than many others who fell afoul of the Red Scare. He kept his job at the Columbia lab and his place at Brooklyn Polytechnic’s night school. He soon moved to the commercial sector. Among other things, he designed radiation detectors for uranium prospecting.
But the family was left scarred. My mother still darkly remembers the climate of fear and suspicion, her parents and older siblings discussing it all in angry whispers. They knew they were being informed upon, that Walter was tainted by the opinions and minor political activities of his relations.
My grandparents had fled Tsarist Russia to escape persecution for their ideas and their Judaism. They found a far freer nation ‒ but also reminders that freedom is not always secure, even in America.
__________
1 Like other small New York parties, the ALP endorsed major-party candidates: mostly Democrats, some Republicans, and Henry Wallace for president in 1948. Under increasing attack for suspected Communist infiltration, the party disbanded in 1956.
2 The artist Marc Chagall, who immortalized Jewish Vitebsk, was an older cousin through Fannie’s mother.
3 His full name was Abraham Walter ‒ named for Fannie’s father Avram and her brother Wolf.
4 The hearing board consisted of a New Jersey lawyer, a distinguished chemist who had worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia, and an AEC representative.
Jeremy A. Stern (Ph.D., Princeton University) is an independent historian and history education consultant. He blogs here, where a longer version of this piece is posted.
“The easiest way to win votes these days is by selling the past.” So says “Politics Goes Back to the Future” (3/02/2017) in Britain’s The Financial Times (FT). And it links the “nostalgic nationalism” of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with Brexit’s “Take Back Control” and “Vladimir Putin’s reassertion of Russian power”—see here on Putin’s nationalistic use of the past. The FT article also mentions the resurgence of nostalgic nationalism in France, where Marine Le Pen heads the right-wing National Front party. But it noted that the 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, an independent centrist who now seems likely to be Ms. Le Pen’s chief rival in the 2017 presidential election, contrasts with Le Pen by being more a “futurist.”
A few months earlier another FT article also mentioned China and Turkey as places where “nostalgic nationalism” had gained traction. Other sources have written about it in contemporary Hungary and Austria. In November 2016, a New York Times piece stated that the successful Polish politician Jarosław “Kaczynski and his followers have [recently] moved with astonishing speed . . . in hopes of deflecting Poland from the orbit of Western Europe and returning it to a past defined by family, church and home.”
What is happening at present in various parts of the world is a reaction against globalization, immigration, terrorism, and other phenomena that are changing people’s worlds faster than they can cope with, all encouraging nostalgic nationalism. In some ways it reminds us of the turn toward right-wing nationalism in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, as the threats of communism and economic dislocation (unleashed by World War I and the Great Depression) disoriented large numbers of people, making them more susceptible to the appeals of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and some eastern European leaders with their toxic mix of ideological brews appealing to the disoriented and fearful.
Donald Trump’s nostalgic nationalism—“make America great again”—appeals to a similar mindset. Here is writer George Saunders’s insightful depiction of Trump supporters in mid-2016. “They loved their country, seemed genuinely panicked at its perceived demise, felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious. They were, generally, in favor of order. . . . Some (far from all) had been touched by financial hardship.” Many believed “they’d been let down by their government. They were anti-regulation, pro small business,” and sensitive to “any infringement whatsoever on their freedom. . . . They were adamantly for law enforcement and veterans’ rights.” Saunders believes that many Trump supporters suffer from what he calls “usurpation anxiety syndrome,” which he defines as “the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other [like illegal immigrants] with questionable intentions.”
Trump’s biggest group of supporters are older white men, many living in smaller cities and towns and rural areas. Many of them feared that the American Dream was being threatened. Five years ago Jon Meacham, biographer of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, identified this dream as “the perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children.” Like Alexis de Tocqueville and many other observers of America, Meacham thought that for most of U. S. history its citizens were forward-looking and optimistic, especially as contrasted with Europeans, who were more traditional and mindful of the past. As Max Lerner wrote in America as a Civilization (1957), “The theme of promise has been America's great ‘social myth.’ `````” But already in 2012 Meacham perceived that the dream was being threatened and that “the American political system shows no sign of reaching solutions commensurate with the problems of the day.”
Nostalgia for supposedly better days and greater national prestige, coupled with fear of new forces—whether immigrants, minorities, terrorists, globalization, new technologies, or whatever else may appear—may motivate voters to support a Trump, Le Pen, or Putin, just as many supported right-wing forces in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. But we all know, including authoritarian leaders, that there is no going back, that like it or not we continue to change ever more rapidly as the twenty-first century advances.
In the face of this rapid change and all the challenges it presents, what should our attitude toward the past and future be? As historians and lovers of history, many of us may be more appreciative of the past than our other fellow citizens. And the temptation to resist changes that unsettle us is strong and not without merit.
We often call those resisting technological change “Luddites,” after the early nineteenth-century English workers who broke up textile machinery that they believed were costing them jobs. But it is not hard to be sympathetic with them or the Romantic poets who decried the negative effects of the Industrial Age, or Thomas Carlyle, who feared that “men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”
Later in the nineteenth century and up to the present, there have been others who have decried many of the effects of the Industrial Revolution begun in England in the 18th century. Two such men are the Russian Leo Tolstoy and our modern writer Wendell Berry, who has been referred to as a “cranky Luddite” and who once wrote an essay entitled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” Another critic of modern industrial systems, whether capitalist or communist, was the economist and environmentalist E. F. Schumacher. In his influential book of the early 1970s, Small Is Beautiful, he furnished five reasons why he thought modern industrial society should fail, including environmental, societal, and moral ones, including the breeding of violence. (See here for numerous links concerning these three men.)
Yet, despite the numerous ethical and other insights of these individuals—and they are many—it seems wise to accept the advice of psychologist, futurologist, and wisdom scholar Thomas Lombardo, who urges us to “thoughtfully and purpose-fully contribute to the ongoing evolution of ourselves individually, and of humanity, nature, and the cosmos.” While realizing the value of studying the past—“Memory of the past . . . is the knowledge foundation for both present and future consciousness, as well as wisdom”—Lombardo believes that that the most central question of our life is, “How do we create a good future?” To do so, we need a “thoughtful understanding of trends, challenges, opportunities, and future possibilities,” a comprehension enriched by our knowledge of the past.
Such a future orientation does not mean that we must accept all aspects of our evolving technological society, where we follow the advice of a mid-1950s U. S. marketing consultant who said: “Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. . . . We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.”
No, instead we may work for a more sustainable economy and society, one that is more eco-friendly. Lombardo urges us to aim to create “An Age of Wisdom,” and certainly such an age demands respect for our environment as Pope Francis and others have urged upon us. It also demands a more equitable and compassionate and less violent world. How we get there is an open question.
People like E. F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry encourage small local steps that resist large-scale industrialization and agriculture. One way of resisting the 1984 or Brave New World futures that some fear President Trump is bringing closer is to encourage diversity and experiments. Bringing about a wiser world will require all the creativity, imagination, and courage we can muster, and it will necessitate learning valuable lessons from our past. It will also require overcoming the “nostalgic nationalism” that appeals not to the best in us, but only to our fears and insecurities.
Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University, Contributing Editor of HNN, and author of “An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces” (Anthem Press, 2008). For a list of his recent books and online publications, click here.
The essay -- written by the Post's Erik Wemple -- detailed the myriad of complaints against O'Reilly and the that Fox News undertook to silence the women who made them.
In 2004, former producer Andrea Mackris filed suit against O'Reilly for a series of suggestive remarks and a number of phone calls in which the conservative host called Mackris while masturbating and penetrating himself with a vibrator. She received a $9 million payout and orders to never speak publicly about the harassment.
Earlier this year, it came to light that producer Juliet Huddy had also received a settlement over harassing behavior by O'Reilly in 2011. Three other women have received settlements from Fox News: Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, Rebecca Gomez Diamond and Laurie Dhue. The network and host, said Wemple, "fashioned a mutual protection racket on the premises of Fox News" in order to quietly handle the flood of complaints.
O'Reilly was also named in a suit by former Fox host Andrea Tantaros, who said that O'Reilly made a series of lurid advances, all of which she rebuffed, only to find her career at the network at a dead end.
"More alleged sleaziness rounds out the O’Reilly file," wrote Wemple. "As reported by the New York Times, former 'O’Reilly Factor' guest Wendy Walsh claims that O’Reilly made the moves on her in 2013."
Walsh reportedly turned O'Reilly down. She said that he made a move to kiss her, causing her to lose her balance and fall, but then made no move to help her off off the ground.
“He became hostile, telling her that she could forget any career advice he had given her and that she was on her own. He also told her that her black leather purse was ugly," said the Times.
Wemple said, "Not long thereafter, as the New York Times reports, Wendy Walsh disappeared from 'The O’Reilly Factor.' She became a former guest, just the way Diamond became a former Fox Business host, just the way Mackris became a former producer for 'The O’Reilly Factor,' just the way Dhue became a former anchor, just the way Huddy became a former on-air talent, just the way Bernstein became a former junior producer."
"Through it all, O’Reilly remains the current King of Cable News," said Wemple. "Nightly he spins whatever arguments are close at hand to make excuses for the actions and behavior of a friend and inveterate misogynist — the president of the United States. He promotes his serially mediocre books, including the recently released 'Old School: Life in the Sane Lane,' which goes after 'snowflakes,' a.k.a. people who come forth with grievances. And he rules the ratings."
Both Fox News and O'Reilly responded to the Times piece by pointing out that none of the women had used the company's internal hotline designated for reporting on the job abuse.
"What the heck is up with this 'hotline' stuff?" Wemple asked. "Must these women suffer twice? Once at the allegedly manipulative and power-tripping O’Reilly, and again at the hands of people faulting them for their failure to call a damn hotline? Shall we henceforth judge all those who claim sexual harassment by their due diligence in ringing up some phone number?"
dripped with self-pity and bristled with righteous indignation, all of which, Wemple said, was for show. O'Reilly, he said, is no victim, and his claims that he paid out the massive settlements in order to protect his family from embarrassment and inconvenience don't hold water.
"The notion, furthermore, that O’Reilly would just roll over and gift-wrap big-money settlements to undeserving complainants just to save his family a bit of trouble — well, that notion contradicts everything we know about O’Reilly. That is, the stubborn and penny-pinching 'old school' guy who’d never surrender a dollar he didn’t have to," said Wemple.
"Fredric S. Newman, a lawyer for O’Reilly, told the New York Times: 'We are now seriously considering legal action to defend Mr. O’Reilly’s reputation,'” Wemple said. "Okay, but in light of O’Reilly’s proven credibility problems exposed by various 'far left' media outlets in 2015, his frequently offensive and irresponsible comments, and his core nastiness, it’s not clear just how much reputation there is to protect anymore. With his far-flung misadventures, O’Reilly appears to have libel-proofed himself."
He went on, "An aggressive lawyer, great ratings and a supportive parent company addicted to the advertising revenue churned out by 'The O’Reilly Factor': The King of Cable News has all the support he needs to continue his particular brand of on-air showmanship. Indeed, it has been reported that O’Reilly’s contract at the network has been renewed."
Given O'Reilly's lack of credibility, his pugilistic viciousness when under attack and his serial instances of sexual abuse, Wemple said, "Here’s an anchor who shouldn’t be trusted to share space with his colleagues, nor to report on women and men. He is an awful, awful man."
“I blame myself—it was my fault, and I take full responsibility for it,” Donald Trump never said, not once in his entire life.
Here’s what else the president didn’t say about the rout and ruin of repeal and replace: “I was clueless about health care policy. Instead of reading my briefing books or even my own bill, I played golf. I bullshitted my way through every meeting and phone call. And when it was explained to me that this dumpster fire of a bill would break my promise that everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they are now, which was a huge applause line by the way, I threw my own voters under the bus.”
In the wake of his Waterloo, instead of manning up, Trump blamed Democrats for not voting to strip health insurance from 24 million people, not voting to cut Medicaid by $880 billion in order to cut taxes by $883 billion and not voting to obliterate the signature legislative accomplishment of the Barack Obama years.
“Look,” he complained with crocodile bafflement to the New York Times, “we got no Democratic votes. We got none, zero.” Yet Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan had not asked a single Democrat what it would take to get them to support a health care bill. “The good news,” Trump said, seeing the sunny side of the catastrophe he predicts is coming, is that the Democrats “now own Obamacare.” Don’t blame me—it’ll be their fault when it explodes, not mine.
Trump blamed Republicans, too. The morning of Friday, March 24, when the bill was still in play, he tweeted that if the Freedom Caucus stops his plan, they would be allowing Planned Parenthood to continue. That afternoon, amid the wreckage, Trump told the Washington Post’s Robert Costa he was just an innocent bystander. “There are years of problems, great hatred and distrust” in the Republican Party, “and, you know, I came into the middle of it.”
White House aides, bravely speaking without attribution, blamed Ryan for snookering the rookie-in-chief into tackling Obamacare before tax reform. Trump himself told Costa, “I don’t blame Paul.” He repeated it: “I don’t blame Paul.” Then again: “I don’t blame Paul at all.”
The laddie doth protest too much, methinks. By tweet time Saturday morning, clairvoyantly touting Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday night Fox News show, Trump had found a surrogate to stick the knife in Ryan without his fingerprints on it. “This is not on President Trump,” Pirro said, avowing that “no one expected a businessman,” a "complete outsider,” to understand “the complicated ins and outs of Washington.” No, it’s on Ryan, she said. Ryan must step down.
Blame precedes politics. In Western civilization’s genesis story, Adam blamed Eve for tempting him, and he blamed God for Eve. But America’s genesis story contains a noble, if apocryphal, counter-narrative: When George Washington’s father asked him who chopped down the cherry tree, the future father of his country didn’t blame someone else—he copped to it. That’s the legacy Harry Truman claimed when he put “The buck stops here” sign on his Oval Office desk.
But Trump is the consummate blame artist, a buck-passer on a sociopathic scale. He kicked off his campaign by blaming Mexico for sending us rapists and stealing our jobs. He blamed Hillary Clinton for founding the birther movement. He blamed President Obama for founding ISIS. He blamed Obama’s Labor Department for publishing a “phony” unemployment rate. He blamed 3 million illegal voters for his losing the popular vote to Clinton. He blamed the botched raid in Yemen on U.S. generals. When U.S. District Judge James Robart ruled against his Muslim travel ban, he blamed Robart for future terrorism: “If something happens, blame him and the court system.” He blamed “fake news” for treating Michael Flynn, “a wonderful man” he had fired as his national security adviser, “very, very unfairly.” He blamed Obama for wiretapping Trump Tower. He made his spokesman blame British intelligence for carrying that out. When GCHQ called that a crock, Trump played artful dodger: “All we did was quote … a very talented lawyer on Fox. And so you shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.”
Obamacare is imperfect but fixable. But Trump wants to bomb it, not improve it. He wants to light the fuse and then blame Democrats for exploding it. Trump could shore up the insurance exchanges that cover 10 million Americans by marketing them when enrollment opens again in November—but I bet he won’t. He could instruct government lawyers to appeal a lawsuit halting federal subsidies for co-payments and deductibles of low-income enrollees that House Republicans won last year—but I bet he won’t. On the other hand, he has the power to narrow the essential benefits Obamacare requires insurers to provide by, say, limiting prescription drug coverage and lowering the number of visits allowed for mental health treatment or physical therapy—and I bet he will.
Will Trump get away with it? He’s spent a lifetime banging his highchair and blaming the dog for his mess. No wonder he calls the free press fake news; no wonder he calls citizen activists paid protesters. You call someone who gets away with blaming others “unaccountable.” You know what the antonym of that is? Impeachable.
Since his shocking election last fall, the media has coalesced around a narrative that millions of Americans across the country voted for Donald Trump on the assumption that he'd be able to recrown King Coal. In West Virginia alone, he captured nearly three times as many votes as Hillary Clinton.
Paul Krugman believes that "simple story" collapses when you "look at the realities of the situation."
In his latest column, the New York Times columnist debunks the notion that any state is truly dependent on coal for its livelihood. While the industry began its decline after the Second World War, it has cratered since 1980, as innovations in extraction techniques eliminated scores of jobs and fracking has provided a cheap, if no less dangerous, natural gas alternative.
"Coal-mining jobs have been disappearing for a long time," he writes. "Even in West Virginia, the most coal-oriented state, it has been a quarter century since they accounted for as much as 5 percent of total employment."
Today, one in six West Virginians actually works in health care and social assistance, much of which is financed by the federal government. The state is also older than most, with 22 percent of its population dependent on Medicare against 16.7 percent for the rest of the country. So why, Krugman wonders, are so many willing to vote against their own apparent self-interest?
“'Coal country' residents weren’t voting to preserve what they have, or had until recently; they were voting on behalf of a story their region tells about itself, a story that hasn’t been true for a generation or more," he writes. "Their Trump votes weren’t even about the region’s interests; they were about cultural symbolism."
Trump's successful manipulation of this nostalgia may prove catastrophic, not only to the region and the country but to the planet at large.
"Going backward on the environment will sicken and kill thousands in the near future," he concludes. "Over the longer term, failing to act on climate change could, all too plausibly, lead to civilizational collapse."
