Fighting Words

So Trumpism is a thing now. The specifics of Trumpist ideology are still unclear, since the president-elect himself is too obtuse, dishonest, and contemptuous of the American tradition of representative government to have developed a cohorent political worldview. But clearly, Trumpism is a civic expression of some familiar and deeply human impulses--unreasoned fear, uncurbed spite, bullheaded ignorance and religious fundamentalism--just like every other authoritarian "ism" in memory, both here and abroad. Like every such movement before it, Trumpism disguises those underlying frailties under the trappings of strength and certainty.

Trumpism is also a natural consequence of America's deteriorating governing structure and traditions: the corporate capture of state and media power, income inequality, civic disengagement, the devaluation of the basic idea of the commons, and the degradation of civil liberties. As a result, we have now entrusted every organ of elected federal government to an avowed authoritarian and his political party.

It's a good bet that most establishment Republicans are also shocked by Trump's victory. Their takeaway from Mitt Romney's loss in 2012 was that the party needed to embrace comprehensive immigration reform to attract Hispanic voters, or they'd never win the presidency again. That was Marco Rubio's whole reason for being. And then the party went and nominated Donald Trump. He was seen by party regulars as a ruffian and a terrible electoral risk. He was supposed to lose, and they were supposed to pretend that he'd never existed.

But he won, with some help from Putin, the FBI, and yes, vote rigging. And now a radical, amoral Republican Party has a completely unexpected opportunity to roll back every progressive policy accomplishment since the Civil War. Their priorities are the priorities of their corporate masters: to wipe out ACA, roll back financial reform, destroy what remains of the union movement, and privatize Medicare, public education, and social security. They will challenge the very idea of federal environmental policy. They will gut workplace safety regulations, void rules governing overtime pay, etc., etc...

And unless the Dems can stop them somehow, they will definitely do serious damage to our country's electoral system. This will be the first time Republicans have controlled both houses and the presidency since Justice Roberts declared the 1965 Voting Rights Act obsolete in 2013's Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court case. So they'll be looking for more and better ways to lock in existing franchise restrictions and further suppress minority voting, or even to change how votes are counted. I expect Republicans to take a page out of Vladimir Putin's playbook by imposing heavy new restrictions on how American elections are monitored. Edit: I note here that Kris Kobach, Kansas' own vote cager extraordinaire, has been named to Trump's transition team.

In exchange for the ability to do everything they've ever wanted, Republicans will now pledge their fealty to Donald Trump. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is getting that little errand out of the way today. House Speaker Paul Ryan is claiming that Trump has a "mandate" despite losing the popular vote. Ryan's a liar by both temperament and profession, but that's probably the most blatant public whopper he's told so far. That's how you know an authoritarian is feeling confident.

I don't know yet what congressional Democrats can do to protect the basic functions of American democracy. But at the very least, every Republican judicial appointment--not just to the Supreme Court--must be fiercely opposed. Going forward, I don't want to hear a single congressional Democrat snivel about how "so-and-so Republican is really a straight shooter (Hi Jim!)" or that "this is the best we're going to get from this administration." I don't ever want to hear Dems talk about how they need to "work across the aisle" to "get something done for the American people," or any other such nonsense. No Republican uttered any of those words in the last eight years. Congressional Republicans refused to even grant a hearing to Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland for almost a year. Merrick f'n Garland! No congress in the history of the country had ever done that before. And not only did Republicans pay no political price for violating the constitution they claim to revere, but their gambit worked to perfection. With Trump's victory, congressional Republicans have successfully stolen a Supreme Court pick out from under a Democratic president. There are no rules anymore, which is an objectively terrible state of affairs. But that's how the ballgame is played now, Dems. You don't have to like it. But by God, don't wimp out. And whatever you do, don't let the Republicans put your presidential candidate in jail.

Here's another idea: stop talking about the Republican Party and Trump as if they aren't one and the same. There are no Republicans anymore, only Trumpists. Every Republican is, and should always be referred to, as a Trumpist for at least as long as he's in office. In writing, quotes, speeches, everything. There is no daylight between the party and the monstrosity at its head. So he should define them, not the other way around. Michael Moore's got some other pretty good ideas about how citizens can organize to oppose the Trumpist takeover of our government. But the point here is that we are now officially in opposition to self-proclaimed facism. The normal rules of decorum no longer apply.

Above all, don't despair. Overt demagoguery tends to have a short shelf life in American politics. The First Red Scare whipped up fears of bolshevist revolution in the United States, resulting in race riots and 1918 Sedition Act--a rather conspicuous violation of the First Amendment. But when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the architect of much of the Red Scare, warned the nation of a communist uprising planned for May Day 1920 and it didn't happen, he was laughed off the public stage and the Sedition Act was repealed. When Joseph McCarthy first burst onto the scene in 1949, he turned the federal government inside out, cynically repurposing genuine American fears about communism into a seemingly invincible partisan weapon. (Notably, Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy's odious chief counsel, was also a legal representative and close advisor to Donald Trump until Cohn's death in 1986.) But Joseph McCarthy also ultimately failed. The moment of his public demise, which came during the Army-McCarthy hearings, was recorded for posterity. Written on his political epitaph were Senator Joseph Welch's famous words, "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" It's a powerful reminder of where we've been, and it's worth rewatching this week.

By some measures at least, we've now entered a far darker time than either of the Red Scares. If you care about the environment and climate change, human rights, income inequality, the alleviation of poverty, national security, equal protection, racial equality, gender equity, public lands, government transparency, civil liberties, public health, financial and industrial regulation, the integrity of our elections, public safety, the future of American democracy, or just the basic Golden Rule, the next four years are going to be agonizing to witness, and for many, to endure. The white backlash has now been mainstreamed, and Trump's election will uncork a flood of racial and gender-based aggression and cruelty. But we are still free to assemble, still free to give of our time and our money, still free to speak. We are free to stand up for one another, to protect each other. And now we have to do all of those things like we have never done them before.

There will come another Joseph Welch moment. It won't come without effort, without concerted and dogged resistance. I don't know when, or how much damage Trumpism will do beforehand. And it may not be a moment at all, but rather a gradual and accumulating diminution of Trumpism's ability to inflict further harm on our body politic. Beneath Donald Trump and his party is the dustbin of history--silently awaiting their inevitable fall. And when it happens, Trumpism won't be a thing anymore. It will be an epithet.

Despots and Borderlands

“For some months, I have traveled and traversed the border in every sense of the word. I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population. To the Dominicans who were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among them, thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits, etc., and were thus prevented from enjoying in peace the products of their labor, I have responded, ‘I will fix this.’ And we have already begun to remedy the situation. Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue.”

— Rafael Trujillo, October 21, 1937

“I will get this done for you and for your family. We’ll do it right. You’ll be proud of our country again. We’ll do it right. We will accomplish all of the steps outlined above. And, when we do, peace and law and justice and prosperity will prevail. Crime will go down. Border crossings will plummet. Gangs will disappear. And the gangs are all over the place. And welfare use will decrease. We will have a peace dividend to spend on rebuilding America, beginning with our American inner cities. We’re going to rebuild them, for once and for all.”

— Donald Trump, August 31, 2016

October 2016 will mark the 79th anniversary of the so-called Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic. In the fall of 1937, the soldiers and police under the command of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo killed an estimated 10-15,000 Haitians living along the Artibonite River, which flows along a stretch of border between the two countries. The genocide went by many names: "El Corte," ("the cutting" in Spanish), Kout kouto (the "knife blow" in Creole), and the massacre du Percil (the Parsley Massacre) in French. The latter name originated from multiple accounts that Dominican soldiers differentiated between Haitians and Dominicans by holding up sprigs of parsley and forcing their potential victims to pronouce the Spanish word for the herb, perejil. Those who could not roll their Rs in convincingly Spanish fashion were immediately executed.

In the decades before the massacre, Haitians and Dominicans along the border had mixed fluidly. "Before the massacre," one Haitian survivor recalled, "in the frontier, although there were two sides, the people were one, united." In fact, families of both cultural heritages had lived together peacefully on both sides of the border for generations. Historians Richard Turits and Lauren Derby argue that the Parsley Massacre’s victims were in fact integral parts of a peaceful, multiethnic borderland community—one that had shown little sign of ethnic fracture. The society they had made together was Rafael Trujillo’s true target.

That society ended as quickly and violently as the lives taken by Trujillo’s soldiers. By 1939, every Haitian living near the border had either been killed or chased away. The Dominicans who remained were compelled by their government to guard against the Haitians’ return, and thereby socially reprogrammed to regard their former neighbors with hatred and suspicion (a trend that persists today). When confronted by the US about the atrocities, Trujillo justified the mass killings as a defensive move against an imaginary “pacific invasion” by Haitians. But the real objective of El Corte was the centralization and consolidation of state power in the Dominican Republic via the utter destruction a syncretic border culture and the militarization of its frontier. In that regard, it succeeded. Not coincidentally, the violent reconquest of the borderlands also aided Trujillo in his own quest for absolute political power, which he retained until his death in 1961.

The Parsley Massacre is one of many modern historical examples of the violent imposition of state power on national frontiers by despotically-inclined governments seeking to consolidate political power within an ethno-nationalist construct. To varying degrees, the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, the Holocaust and the Bosnian genocide all targeted borderlands and frontier regions as sites of ethnic cleansing and genocide, in the service of nation building and consolidation of political authority.

During his run for the presidency, Donald Trump has drawn a number of comparisons to various historical autocrats. His appeals to xenophobic nationalism, pathological self-regard, and crypto-authoritarianism find parallels in the examples of other well-known despots. Recently, Omar Encarnacion of Foreign Affairs explicitly likened Trump to Rafael Trujillo, placing the Republican nominee squarely within the caudillismo tradition of charismatic authoritarianism, common in modern Latin American history.

I have no idea how accurate these comparisons are. I hope we don’t have to find out. But I’m particularly struck by the similarities between the Trump and Trujillo quotes at the beginning of this post. Both of them take it as given that transnational borderland cultures are problems--problems that they alone, using the full legal and military might of the state, can solve. Both characterize non-natives and ethnic minorities as innately lawless and dangerous, and both posit border militarization and even ethnic cleansing as state-strengthening remedies. "Without a border," as Trump is fond of saying, "we just don't have a country."

The long and bloody history behind this kind of rhetoric is worrisome—particularly in border states like Texas, which already have violent and racially-charged borderland histories. (My friend and colleague Miguel Levario has written an excellent and moving history on the militarization of the Texas border.) But the fact that these words come from a candidate with no sense of—or respect for—the limits of presidential power makes them more frightening still.

A full year and a half into this campaign, it’s still basically impossible to make any predictions about what a Trump presidency would mean for domestic and foreign policy, because his policy proposals are so vague. But his proposed “big beautiful wall” and forced deportation of 11 million people aren’t just policy proposals, they’re threats. And though it may be difficult to predict what he'd actually do, it's pretty clear who and what he is threatening: the people, economies and cultures of La Frontera.

Their (Straw)Man in Washington

About a week after any particularly shocking or spectacular mass shooting, the nation is usually treated to the thoughts of Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association. Recall that one week after Sandy Hook, LaPierre blamed the mass murder of 20 children on “gun free zones” in schools, and claimed that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The real culprits, he said, were violent videogames, along with the country’s “refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill.” Coming as they did in the midst of a period of horror and grief, LaPierre’s comments became fodder for nationwide criticism and ridicule. Even ardently pro-2nd Amendment conservatives distanced themselves from him. But four months later, the two Sandy Hook-inspired bills proposing modest new restrictions on assault weapons and expanded background checks died in the Senate. And it wasn’t even a tough vote. Even after Sandy Hook, lawmakers paid absolutely no political price for their service to the American gun industry. Wayne LaPierre had paid it for them.

The 7-day mark for the Pulse Nightclub shooting came this past Sunday, when John Dickerson interviewed LaPierre on CBS' Face the Nation. This time around, the NRA frontman rejected the notion that the nightclub shooting had anything to do with targeting the LGBTQ community, or with the easy availability of tactical-grade firepower to a man known by the FBI to have radical Islamic inclinations. This time, according to LaPierre, the real issue was “terrorism.” One might imagine that someone interested in preventing terrorism would be ok with stopping people on a terrorist watchlist from buying assault weapons. But when pressed on that point, LaPierre argued that doing so would somehow be “tipping off the bad guys.” (Oddly, this argument has yet to be made against the no-fly list.) Unsurprisingly, the Senate voted down any meaningful gun control legislation yesterday: one day after LaPierre’s appearance on television, and eight days after the deadliest single-gunman massacre in modern American history. The pattern is clear: the “debate” about gun control has become a circular discourse that produces no change. Thousands more Americans will die because of it.

Strangely, we still don’t seem to have a good fix on exactly what Wayne LaPierre is. The media treats him as a thought leader on the issue of guns, even though everyone already knows exactly what he thinks. Wayne LaPierre is not a thought leader, or a politician, or an activist. He is not a true party to any debate over gun regulation, because he has no authority to make concessions on behalf of his principals—the gun manufacturers. He is merely an agent of a massive industrial apparatus that wants to stay politically invisible. He is a program on a recursive loop. His only job is to keep gun manufacturers and their congressional enablers from ever having to come to the negotiating table. Whenever anything particularly unfortunate happens involving a firearm in this country, Wayne LaPierre trots out onto the public stage and metaphorically lights himself on fire. Gun control advocates immediately challenge his over-the-top rhetoric, and the circle of gun control discourse remains closed, leading nowhere.

As long as LaPierre is treated as if he has anything of value to add to gun control debate, and as long as gun control advocates continue to be suckered into directly engaging with him in the political arena, then he is succeeding in his task. He is a red herring; a heat sink. His continued success means that his corporate paymasters, including Midway USA, Springfield Armory, Beretta, Sturm Ruger, Smith & Wesson and Taurus, need never cease—let alone answer for—their moral crimes. His continued success ensures that the politicians who faithfully serve the gun industry will continue to do so without consequence.

Unlike the vulnerable corporations cowering behind him, Wayne LaPierre cannot be shamed, bankrupted or politically defeated. He must be bypassed.

Trump and the End of "It's Not About Race"

In a now-infamous 1981 interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater opined that the New Right no longer needed to be explicitly racist to carry the South. In fact, Atwater argued, by refusing to discuss race, while simultaneously pushing policies that “hurt…blacks…worse than whites,” Republicans could potentially “[do] away with the racial problem” altogether. In the decades since, artful phraseology (think welfare queens, forced bussing, states’ rights, super predators) has allowed conservatives to traffic in the politics of racial division while maintaining an outward veneer of “color-blindness.” It has also mainstreamed the conservative critique of the Civil Rights movement, making it legible and popular beyond the American South. When called out on the implicit racial divisiveness of this kind of political messaging, conservatives often counter by accusing critics of “playing the race card.” An ingenious rhetorical device, the Race Card simultaneously deflects blame for injecting race into politics, while clarifying and reinforcing the original coded message.

The “it’s not about race” strategy has worked out well for the modern Republican Party, to put it mildly. And it’s so easy...all you have to do is not mention race, ever! And when an opponent points out the disparate racial impacts of the policies you’re proposing, you hit ‘em with the Race Card! It’s such a familiar, tried-and-true tactic on the right that, even now, it’s almost incredible to see the Republican presidential nominee dispense so completely with pretense of racial opacity. To the extent that there is a deep uneasiness with Trump’s candidacy among Republicans, I suspect that his gleeful shredding of the Atwater playbook has a great deal to do with it. To Trump's most ardent supporters, Atwater's injunction against explicit political racism is just another manifestation of PC culture run amok. To the Republican establishment, many of whom owe their careers to "It's not about race-ism," what Trump is doing probably looks like political suicide, for him and for them.

And maybe it is. But if Trump even makes a good show of it, get ready for a wave of post-Atwater Republicans, who will no longer consider it necessary to disguise the racism at their movement's core.

The Future of Public Water

In 2013--about the same time that the State of Michigan enacted a law enabling 'emergency managers' to take over financially-distressed municipal governments like Flint--the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill make it easier to force the regionalization the state's public utilities. The law, which was ostensibly written to improve the efficiency of municipal services, appeared to specifically target the city of Asheville's water system, which was to be annexed to the Buncombe County regional water authority. The city successfully challenged the "transfer law's" constitutionality in trial court, but lost on appeal. Oral arguments before the state Supreme Court began this week. Many see the transfer law as a first step toward privatizing a major chunk of Asheville's revenue-generating urban infrastructure.

Cities have always been battlegrounds when it comes to the control of public services. Today, the forces arrayed against local, community control is higher than ever. Economically stressed communities like Flint are facing unprecedented pressure to give up local control, or risk losing basic services altogether. But it isn't just the Flints of the world facing these pressures. Uber's recent battle with the city of Austin over fingerprinting its drivers was actually an attempt strong-arm the city into exempting ride sharing companies from municipal regulation. AT&T just successfully killed municipal broadband expansion in Tennessee. Charter schools chip away at the public education model that serves most American children.

But water is different. If Flint has taught us anything, it's that water service should not be run like a business. For over 100 years, local public utilities have supplied American cities with clean, safe, and affordable water. And while many of these municipal systems do require expensive updates, privatization is not the mechanism for making those necessary investments.