This is the bad guy in half of all movies ever made. And he’ll be remembered fondly…

There are a few sureties about personnel decisions in the Trump administration that are basically axiomatic at this point.

1. Everyone is basically a cheap grifter and a penny-ante crook (hi Ben Carson! Nice to see you Ryan “Don’t Call It A Jet, Elitists!” Zinke.”)
2. The one comforting things about the fact that everyone who works for Trump eventually gets ritually humiliated by a petty bully is that everyone who works for Trump deserves to get ritually humiliated by a petty bully.
3. While it’s nice to see people leave, what comes next is always worse.

That brings us to yesterday’s “firing by tweet” of Rex Tillerson, who 15 months ago was one of the most powerful and private men in the world. This was a humiliating end to a man who could pick up the phone and get kings and billionaires on the line, and who could remake the world based on his pipeline politics.

He never really got to do that as Secretary of State, because he worked for a childish idiot equal parts venal and ignorant, but he was able to “accomplish” some things. He completely gutted the State Department, being unable or unwilling to fill key roles, and lost hundreds and hundreds of professionals staffers and area experts. He diminished the role of American diplomacy to, at best, an afterthought.

And sure, part of that was that he worked for a President who didn’t want any independent power bases, and who assumes he could (and should) rule on a whim. Trump was always all-in on “deconstructing the administrative state”, not out of any deep ideology, but out of the overwhelmingly narcissistic idea that he alone can get the job done.

(The brings up another of this blog’s axioms: all of Trump’s personal pathologies line up directly with GOP ideology. He’s the quintessential Republican, even if he doesn’t know it.)

But to blame this all on Trump is to completely miss the point of Tillerson. Rex ran Exxon like a sort of god-king. He wasn’t particularly vain, at least not in the Trumpian sense, but he believed that corporations shouldn’t be shackled by the government. He thought that they could (and should) run their own parallel diplomacy, and was frustrated by being restrained by those pencildicks at Foggy Bottom, who cared about “human rights” or “the national interest.” (see Steve Coll’s Private Empire for more on this.)

In that sense, he accomplished what he wanted. He destroyed the State Department, and left it unable to serve its primary function. And in the few instances where he acted like a reasonable grownup, such as in North Korea, Iran, and lately with Russia, he was undermined because he never really understood how to build a power center, and couldn’t stand up to our wet idiot of a President.

So overall? Worst Secretary of State in my lifetime at least. Kissinger was more venal, of course, and deserves to be remembered as a murderous criminal. Powell was a good man who enabled terrible things. But everything Rex did was bad, and what he didn’t do is catastrophic.

And, of course, what comes next is worse. 

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You also have to take into account just how much he looks like a Thomas Nast cartoon of himself.

(Disclosure: I volunteered on the Ameya Pawar campaign for most of its duration, but not having enough money, he had to drop out in October.)

There is no honest or non-cynical way to argue that money doesn’t have a corrosive impact on our politics. You can argue that it isn’t the most poisonous element in our democracy–there’s also race, unacknowledged history, a legacy of violence and exploitation, a constant genuflection toward the gods of capital, Chris Cizilla–but the unlimited flow of money in politics amplifies and entrenches all those things.

There are very few people on the actual Left, and very few liberals, and even few Democrats, who disagree with this. Most potential candidates rail against Citizens United, and vow to work to overturn it. It is solidifying a system where only the richest can compete in politics, which is cancerous to democracy. Indeed, you could argue that such alienation is one of the reasons why people voted for Trump: if the system is rigged, throw in the crazy person. (I think that’s an element, but Trumpism is way more complicated than that).

The problem is, to overturn the role of money in politics, you have to win, which generally takes money. Ideally, liberal/Democratic candidates like to brag about small donations, which are clearly less corrupt. But when you get into the higher heavens of politics, that doesn’t always cut it. Candidates have to raise huge amounts of money to win, and that means buying into the same system they are railing against.

And so the moral issue for Democrats: must we bend the knee to money in order to overthrow its reign? Or by doing so, do you solidify its rule?

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Even though I’ve known and hated Donald Trump for literally as far back as I can remember, in some 80s hazy grade school mist, there was a time I didn’t think about him every day. Sure, I’d mediate on his grotesque pointlessness if I saw a commercial for his dingdong show for idiots, or whenever Fox would air his disjointed ramblings, but I bet I could go weeks at a time without thinking of him.

It’s deeply painful to know that now I’ll probably think of him every day for like the rest of my life, no matter how this plays out. Some memory will pop into my head. That’s sort of what I mean by totalitarianism: this giant balloon in your brain that crowds out everything besides autonomic functions.

Sigh. Maybe I’ll just turn this blog into nothing but reviews of books published at least 50 years ago. But until then, another roundup…

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It seemed almost inevitable, as the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High found their voice through pain and grief, as they responded with anger and frustration to the ritualistic banalities that follow like vultures after American bloodshed, and as they began to name names, that there would be a backlash.

It was impossible, in our day, to think that survivors of a massacre would have some breathing space without facing fierce retribution. It was impossible to think that activism in the face of tragedy would go unpunished. We all knew, as the horrible week turned into the weekend, and as they mobilized and gathered momentum, that they would soon be in the cross-hairs of the right.

We know why: they do have moral authority, they aren’t afraid, they don’t want to mouth the numbing “come together” catchphrase, and they are damn good at organizing. They are calling the NRA and its enablers on their murderous bullshit, and that’s terrifying to wingers.

So the backlash was coming, but I wasn’t quite sure which form it would take. It was clear that some assholes would continue to be assholes…

Or, I don’t know, the news that their friends were being gunned down in the hallways next to them was probably pretty bad too…

…but for the most part, even wingers didn’t want to openly mock these kids. So they settled on some kind of rough consensus, based around two points. One of these was cruel, if understandable and plausible, and the other, well…

1. These kids were young and stupid and don’t actually know anything about life or policy, and they are just being emotional right now
2. They are being manipulated during their time of trauma by the organized Left, especially George Soros.

This is, sadly, not a joke.

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At one point last year, I think shortly before the inauguration that wrenched us across the border into this absurd and terrifying period, I woke up with a palimpsest of thoughts, the first a video-like replay of the moment during the debate where Hillary Clinton accused then-reality-star Trump of being a Russian puppet.

If you remember, he leaned into the mic and said, “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” At the time, we all knew there was something hinky going on with Russia, but the next layer of thought in that morning black wasn’t about his deflecting the truth, but the artless and childish and idiotic way in which he did it. There was a moment of disconnect for me, where I thought how amazing it was that someone so dumb could come close to the Presidency. And even as that thought flickered through my gauzy dawnish brain, the horrible truth of what happened next came roaring like an unstoppable train.

For me, that is one of the worst parts of this horrible period, where the Republican Party is going all in on undermining every one of our institutions, subverting the rule of law in order to protect one man. It’s not just that they are breaking our democracy, it is that they are breaking our democracy for this schlub, for this witless dummy and his graspingly moronic children.

But that’s just for me. I have the luxury of having semi-removed despair. For those on the spear-end of racial authoritarianism, there is no remove. For those who are being ripped from their country and torn apart from their familes, or who are in the crosshairs of a new push toward massive incarceration, there is no distance.

In their incredible and powerful new book, How Democracies Die, Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt outline the ways in which democracies can be eroded from within, slowly and then very quickly. They talk about the way in which norms are ignored, and more importantly, how allies give up any pretense of democratic leanings in order to protect their primary representative, whether that is Hugo Chavez or Donald Trump.

The cover isn’t subtle, but then, neither is what is happening. 

But most importantly, in the American context, they put into stark relief how central a role race and racism play in our democracy. They make the now-obvious but to me unremarked upon point that post-Civil War, democratic comity was dependent upon both parties agreeing to ignore civil rights.

It was only when the moral force of that issue was no longer ignorable, thanks to the bravery of the activists, the cruelty of the perpetrators, and the unrelenting and unmistakeable humanity of those ground under Jim Crow’s footsteps, that movement was made. And once the Democrats shook off their racist roots and became the party of Civil Rights, and the GOP became the home of apartheid, that our norms started fraying.

In this accelerated period, we see it in stark relief. Really, we see both sides. For people like me, protected from the worst by race and class and circumstance, the sudden capsizing of our democracy is playing out as farce. For those who are paying with their lives for the Republican reliance on racial animosity, it is tragedy.

The two sides are connected. If we really want to understand what is happening here, we have to look at both sides.

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Erie PA is not a metaphor for the chilling freeze overtaking our democracy, but it’s not not, either

Dave Wiegel this morning talked about a ridiculous, ludicrous story that barely even bats a single brow, here in the late bitter cold of 2017.

Roy Moore, the Republican nominee who lost Alabama’s closely watched Senate race this month, has filed a last-minute legal complaint alleging “election fraud” and asking the state not to confirm the victory of Democrat Doug Jones.

In the complaint filed in state court, Moore’s campaign argues that Alabama “will suffer irreparable harm if the election results are certified without preserving and investigating all the evidence of potential fraud.” It cites rumors of election fraud that have already been investigated and refuted by the Alabama secretary of state, argues that high Democratic turnout in key areas was statistically unlikely, and reports that Moore himself has taken a polygraph test — an attempt to disprove allegations that he made unwanted sexual advances on teenagers when he was in his 30s.

Weigel obviously gets to the heart of this nonsense when he talks about rumors that have been “investigated and refuted” by Alabama’s deeply-red Secretary of State. These aren’t even “rumors”, really, as much as “completely made up nonsense by racists and vandals.”

They involve, as you would assume, Soros-funded buses dragging out-of-state blacks and other liberals into small towns in a state with the toughest voter ID laws in the country to swing an election by some 20,000 votes.

There’s another great part in this story.

The complaint also recounts how the secretary of state investigated a viral video of a man saying people had come from “across the country” to help beat Moore — but goes on to argue that the investigation was not transparent. The man in the video turned out to be a legal Alabama voter.

Now, anyone who has ever worked on any election know what that means: there were volunteers coming from everywhere. That happens in every election.  This was one Jones volunteer who excitedly said that they united the country to win, and the right-wing took that as proof of a massive conspiracy. That’s right: they think that they caught some guy going “We have voter fraud, baby! We made the illegal!”

(The whining about it being investigated but not being “transparent” is great. You know the investigation was the SoS going into another room, counting to ten, and coming out and being like “Well boys, we looked into it…”)

The other part of the complaint is that it was statistically unlikely that Democratic turnout in general, and black turnout specifically, was so high. That’s almost cute, because Roy Moore can’t fathom how so many people hate him.

Now, Moore is backed up in this by “election experts”, which is a way of saying people who make up stuff about elections in order to suppress black votes. Weigel politely puts paid to the story.

The experts came to the case with baggage of their own. James Condit Jr., one of the election analysts who signed an affidavit on behalf of Moore’s campaign, has written and spoken about “Zionist” control of world politics, and alleged an Israeli role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Richard Charnin, who provided the court with an argument that there was just enough possible fraud to swing the election, claimed to have “mathematically” proven a conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

OK, so a loathsome, wildly unpopular figure disputes that unpopularity by claiming to be the victim of massive fraud and conspiracy, against the reality of any evidence, gethers cranks and weirdoes to “prove” his entirely fabricated allegations, takes every opposition statement in bad faith and blows it up into conspiratorial nonsense which gets amplified by the right-wing noise machine, and uses the machinery of state to further his ambitions and monkey-wrench our democracy. What does that make Roy Moore?

An establishment Republican.

As we (unoriginally) pointed out when he won his run-off against Luther Strange, Roy Moore is a perfect establishment Republican: beholden to conspiracy, an expert at self-victimization, a bully and a brute, and an anti-democratic demagogue. To quote myself, because no one else will:

 Roy Moore is just another example of how wild and ultimately ungovernable this country is, and how mean-spirited and bigoted and narrow-minded today’s right wing is, and with that, with his comic-opera cruelty and sneering, gun-blasted piety, he’ll fit right into Mitch McConnell’s Senate.

What was true then is even more true now. Since then Trump’s assaults on the FBI have ramped up, and the Republican Party has continued to march lockstep with this hammering away at our norms. They are undermining any attempt to have a law-based society, and a fact-based one, and are giving into authoritarianism far quicker than I had even thought possible.

This week’s terrifying calls for “purges” of disloyal FBI agents by Florida Congressman Francis Rooney is part of that. While it is easy to write off as the ravings of a lunatic, it isn’t very far off from what other people, both inside government and in the influential right-wing circus media, have been saying.

These people are working for a government of permanent minority, dedicated to white supremacy in the form of plutocratic worship and exclusionary theocracy. They are willing to commit treason for it (as Digby points out, the leading Congressional charge against Mueller is coming from Floridians, who seem to be pretty involved in Russian electoral interference). They believe in wild conspiracies and outlandish assaults on reason.

So why should Moore concede? Why should he back down? What difference do facts make when you have no shame, and are willing to do whatever it takes to establish a denuded landscape of wage-servants fighting each other along racial lines while walled off from the billionaire class and their self-selected fetch-servants?

After all, he is a Republican, dead-center in the mainstream of that wretched collection of goons and thieves. They’re falling in line behind Trump, and Trumpism, as this terrible year ends in the vice-grip of a shattering cold, driving deep into the frozen marrow of our bones, threatening to break everything we once knew.

Yes, that’s Dean Cain, in case you were wondering if Trump can’t pull in the stars. He still can, baby! 

So, I was on the el yesterday, and at one of the stops a woman shambled toward the seats in front of me, causing her potential seat-mate to instinctively scoot away. Understandably: she was singing and laughing to herself, dressed in baggy rags, with that particular human odor of neglect proceeding and enveloping her.

She sat in front of me, so for the next 10 minutes I had a one-man audience to her songs, a garbled mix of half-remembered hymns and “Frosty the Snowman”, interspersed with high-pitched laughing when the robotic voice announced the stop. She incorporated the name of the station in her tunes in a way that I found delightful.

When I got to my stop, I walked past her and sort of half-smiled, and she looked at me, burst into laughter, and said “MERRY CHRISTMAS, FROSTY!”

And I thought: well, she must be crazy. It’s only November 30th.

Well.

In his later remarks, the president told the crowd how long he’d been waiting to say “Merry Christmas,” a nod to his 2016 campaign promises that Americans would be “saying Merry Christmas again.”

“Today is a day that I’ve been looking very much forward to all year long,” the president said. “It’s one that we’ve heard and we speak about and we dream about and now, as the president of the United States, it’s my tremendous honor to now wish America and the world a very Merry Christmas.”

This was one of the main talking points our dumbest possible candidate had during the campaign, before he transitioned into the idiot President: that people would be saying Merry Christmas again, because of him. It wasn’t very subtle. He sort of understood the War on Christmas talking points and, but doesn’t understand (and indeed rejects) anything like subtlety or nuance.

What he does have a genius for is how to turn the lingering scars of resentments, both real and imagined, into gaping, suppurating wounds. And, due to his overwhelming ego, he convinced people that he would be the one to change it. So he ratcheted the rhetoric up to 11.

In Trump’s telling, absolutely no one said “Merry Christmas” during the Obama years. It never came up. December was a grim and joyless slog toward an undefined date where we gathered, in a foggish trance, driven only by the sense-memory that Dec 25th used to mean something, and exchanged practical gifts and bowls of oatmeal around a fake gingko tree.

It was basically this grim. Check out what he said in St. Louis the other day, in a speech about the “tax plan” (he didn’t talk much about the tax plan, because he certainly doesn’t understand it, and isn’t smart enough to pretend it is something other than the class warfare Gotterdammerung).

“Remember, I was the one when I was here the last time, I said, ‘We’re going to have Christmas again,’ ’’ Trump said. “I was the one that said, you go to the department stores and you see ‘Happy New Year’ and you see red and you see snow and you see all these things. You don’t see ‘Merry Christmas’ anymore. With Trump as your president, we are going to be celebrating ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”

In Trump’s telling, having red and having snow and all those things is somehow not celebrating Christmas, which comes as a surprise to anyone who has been to any store since Thanksgiving and been assaulted by “The Little Drummer Boy”. He is right, though, that people don’t say “Merry Christmas”, but there is a reason for that: it isn’t fucking Christmas until December 25th.

Think of how insane their proposition is. They think that when you walk into a store this evening the person checking you out should say “Merry Christmas”, 24 days before the holiday. It would be like the dude at Target saying “Happy 4th of July!” in mid-June. I mean, we have the American flag paper plates on display, so why not say it?

The thing is, everybody says Merry Christmas on Christmas. And usually for the few days before. If you’re going on vacation on like, the 18th, you say “have a Merry Christmas” to your co-workers as you leave. That’s normal. What isn’t normal is to say a day’s salutations literally weeks in advance, with numbing repetition.

And they obviously know all of this, and you know all of this. Their whole point isn’t to celebrate Christmas; the point is aggressive identity politics. The snarling, combatitive “Merry Christmas” is to make anyone who isn’t celebrating uncomfortable, unwelcome, excluded.

And it isn’t even just anyone who isn’t celebrating; it’s anyone who isn’t celebrating the right way. Hell, I love Christmas, and I’m as secular and liberal as you can get. My bride and I are decorating this weekend. We go nuts. Lights illuminating the every nook and cranny, a real tree, fake fluffy snow bringing memories of frost to every windowsill. It’s a goddamn wonderland. But that’s not enough.

It’s not enough because they have an extremely exclusionary and bigoted vision of what America should be, one that isn’t close enough to encompass a general holiday season, where you can be happy about a lot of things for a whole month. That’s how small and petty and terrified they are. And their avatar is in power.

We see this narrow bigotry in so many places, in so many ways. It manifests itself in the cruelty of the border wall. It manifests itself in the repeated Muslim bans. It manifests itself in Jeff Session’s daily racism. It clearly manifests itself when Trump tweets out fascist propaganda in order to incite violence (alientating our primary ally). It even comes to fore in our nuclear terror with North Korea, where the President preens and blusters and has to show he’s a bigger man than some stunted Asiatic.

It’s beyond argument that bigotry (which is broader than racism, and sometimes less cruel, though they are related) is at the heart of Trumpism. The insane tax plan, which will solidify the plutocracy’s power-and-money-grab for a generation, puts paid that this was at all about helping Johhny Blacklung.

There are people who thought Trump could help the overcome their economic straits, for sure. A lot of people genuinely thought he was a good businessman, with the evidence being: he was on TV. A lot of people were just crying out against change, in some ways an understandable thing.

But at the end, Trump was taking the pain of change and promising not salvation, but retribution. He didn’t promise to make things better; he was the promise of getting even. He promised to bring the rest of us down to size, so we can all be miserable together. He would give the disposssed not any real hope or opportunity, but a chacne to jab the flag of final surrender right into the spine of a fallen enemy. We might all be in the trash heap, but someone’s trash heap has a few gnarled and flickering strings of Christmas lights and the blood of the fallen to brighten their hovel.

Happy holidays!