P.M. Carpenter

Pleasing the paranoid left: It's just too easy for some of us lefty writers

In his seething latest, "Something About This Russia Story Stinks," Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi again rips open his jacket to expose a T-shirted, red-and-yellow-diamond-encased S for Supersleuth, or, very Suspicious news analyst. He is suspicious of Obama's "terse statement" accompanying additional sanctions against Russia, which, in Taibbi's rather odd wording, the president "seem[ed] to blame ... for the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails." There was of course no seeming about it, since Obama declared with no equivocation that "These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government." What really riles Taibbi, though, is that "Absent independent verification, reporters will have to rely upon the secret assessments of intelligence agencies to cover the story at all. Many reporters I know are quietly freaking out about having to go through that again. We all remember the WMD fiasco."

There, in that last part, Taibbi commits the logical fallacy of faulty comparison, inasmuch as Bush II's ramrodded intelligence agencies are not, 15 years later, precisely the same as Obama's intelligence agencies. While it's plausible that the sitting president coerced agreement from intelligence with the administration's predetermined conclusions, in much the same aggressive manner his predecessor did, there have been no yelping agency leaks (as one would expect) suggesting this was the case. What's more, Taibbi's unhappiness with the FBI and DHS' publicly issued report, "Grizzly Steppe," stems from his assessment that it is "long on jargon but short on specifics." Just how specific these two agencies could have been -- beyond their providing, in their words, "technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence Services" -- without disclosing highly sensitive methods of investigation remains a question of fierce, legitimate debate.

Putting aside these two subordinate objections to Taibbi's detection of a malodorous story, I note the Rolling Stoner goes on to grieve that "Reports by some Democrat-friendly reporters ... have attempted to argue that Trump surrogates may have been liaising with the Russians because they either visited Russia or appeared on the RT network. Similar reporting about Russian scheming has been based entirely on unnamed security sources."

Enter my further unhappiness with Taibbi's coverage. In writing that domestic news stories about Russian scheming have been based entirely on unnamed security forces, he willfully(?) overlooks an exceptionallly high-ranking Russian-security player, deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, whom the Interfax news agency quoted earlier this month: "There were contacts. We continue to do this and have been doing this work during the election campaign." The NY Times reported that Russia's Foreign Ministry later clarified that "Ryabkov had been referring to American politicians and supporters of Mr. Trump, not members of his campaign staff.... The contacts were carried out through the Russian ambassador in Washington, who reached out to the senators and other political allies to get a better sense of Mr. Trump’s positions on various issues involving Russia." The latter group -- "political allies" -- was described by Ryabkov himself as Trump's "immediate entourage."

Does it strain either phraseology or credibility to include in Ryabkov's "immediate entourage" -- often a cliché-ish substitute for mere "entourage" -- Trump's platoons of unpaid, non-staffer surrogates, those seen so exhaustingly throughout the campaign on cable news? Say, Trump's Omarosa Manigault, Scottie Nell Hughes, Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany? Who's to say -- particularly in the manner of Taibbi's un-strained suspiciousness -- that one or more of these prattling heads were not in fact among Trump's political allies "liaising with the Russians," and anonymously referenced by Ryabkov?

Taibbi's disgust with some "Democrat-friendly" outlets continues: "There have been other excesses. An interview with Julian Assange by an Italian newspaper has been bastardized in Western re-writes, with papers like The Guardian crediting Assange with 'praise' of Trump," thus connecting WikiLeaks' selective favors to Trump with orchestrated skulduggery. Seemingly preens Taibbi in parentheses: "The Guardian has now 'amended' a number of the passages in the report in question" -- although not the leading one questioned by the preener. His mirrors Glenn Greenwald's disgust of a week before: "The shoddy and misleading Guardian article ... was published on December 24. It made ... [the] demonstrably false" claim that "Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview."

Taibbi-Greenwald dispute any such Assangean praise by quoting what they insist are Assange's inoffensive remarks: "Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better." Greenwald supplies what he sees as damning context to the "shoddy and misleading" Guardian story: "Appearing to suggest the disclosures in the run-up to the election were a form of payback, [Assange] added: 'If someone and their network behave like that ['torturing' Chelsea Manning and imprisoning her for 35 years, as well as acting as the 'chief proponent and architect' of the failed Libya intervention], then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means.'"

Let us return to the question of straining vocabulary and credibility. Is it really an in-credibility for any circumspect political commentator to assert, with the unignorable splendor of Himalayan empiricism as backdrop, that the wholesale abomination of Trumpism could in any notable way pose a "change for the better," or that "what Donald Trump means" is for now a puzzling, unanswerable question? Perhaps since I no longer possess an unsunlighted, space-inhibiting colon I, for one, could bury my head just far enough up my posterior to pen such indictable rubbish. I would promptly lose, however, my self-preening circumspection.

So there you have it -- what I interpret as Matt Taibbi's pageviews- and H.S. Thompson-induced eagerness to cosset his readers' fuming paranoia of our "deep-state" intelligence agencies. That's not to say that all of the leftist family's paranoid tendencies should be deprogrammed; it is instead to say that responsible vigilance is the nuclear family's more prudent first cousin. But for the contemporary left's polemical coddlers, to shake a stick at the nation's always fearsome intelligence services, whether under a Democratic or Republican POTUS, is nestled in the laziest of celebrated formulas.

One might level the admissible accusation that my objections to Taibbi's piece are petty and tiresome in their ardent prosecution of perhaps minor rhetorical transgressions. After all, who among us hawkers of polemical righteousness has never distorted when at least a particle of knowing distortion vastly assisted in selling the otherwise sublime product? My countering objection would be that when the topic before us is a surefire readership-pleaser, such as arrant suspicions of U.S. intel's incorrigible gathering and disposition, then what one has written is little more than a sop to vulnerable preconceptions -- not analysis. That, in "Something About This Russia Story Stinks," is what Matt Taibbi is selling -- and it's just too easy.

 

One can enjoy both physics and metaphysics

Former Harvard an MIT astrophysicist Alan Lightman's article, "The physics and metaphysics of the creation of the universe," in last January's Harper's Magazine, elucidates why I retain a philosophical allegiance to agnosticism, rather than swinging to -- some would say more honestly -- atheism. Because his article is 3,749 words long, perhaps my 682-word quote won't seem excessive.

Most physicists believe that in this quantum era, the entire observable universe was roughly a million billion billion times smaller than a single atom. The temperature was nearly a million billion billion billion degrees. Time and space churned like boiling water. Of course, such things are unimaginable. But theoretical physicists try to imagine them in mathematical form, with pencil and paper. Somehow, time as we know it emerged in that fantastically dense nugget. Or perhaps time already existed, and what emerged was the "arrow" of time, pointing toward the future....

It is well known in the science of order and disorder that, other things being equal, larger spaces allow for more disorder, essentially because there are more places to scatter things. Smaller spaces therefore tend to have more order. As a consequence, in [one cosmological hypothesis], the order of the universe was at a maximum at the Big Bang; disorder increased both before and after....

A second major hypothesis is that the universe, and time, did not exist before the Big Bang. The universe materialized literally out of nothing, at a tiny but finite size, and expanded thereafter. There were no moments before the moment of smallest size because there was no "before." Likewise, there was no "creation" of the universe, since that concept implies action in time. Even to say that the universe "materialized" is somewhat misleading. As Hawking describes it, the universe "would be neither created nor destroyed. It would just BE"....

[Q]uantum cosmologists are aware of the vast philosophical and theological reverberations of their work. As Hawking says in A Brief History of Time, many people believe that God, while permitting the universe to evolve according to fixed laws of nature, was uniquely responsible for winding up the clock at the beginning and choosing how to set it in motion. Hawking’s own theory provides an explanation for how the universe might have wound itself up — his method of calculating the early snapshots of the universe has no dependence on initial conditions or boundaries or anything outside the universe itself. The icy rules of quantum physics are completely sufficient. “What place, then, for a creator?” asks Hawking....

[M]ost quantum cosmologists do not believe that anything caused the creation of the universe.... [Q]uantum physics can hypothesize a universe without cause — just as quantum physics can show how electrons can change orbits in an atom without cause. There are no definite cause-and-effect relationships in the quantum world, only probabilities. [One theoretic physicist] put it this way: "In everyday life we talk about cause and effect. But there is no reason to apply that thinking to the universe as a whole. I do not feel in any way unsatisfied by just saying, 'That’s the way it is'"....

In the 1940s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow developed the concept of a hierarchy of human needs. He started with the most primitive and urgent demands, and ended with the most lofty and advanced. At the bottom of the pyramid are physical needs for survival, like food and water. Next up is safety. Higher up is love and belonging, then self-esteem. The highest of Maslow’s proposed needs, self-actualization, is the desire to get the most out of ourselves, to be the best we can be. I would suggest adding one more category at the very top of the pyramid, above even self-actualization: imagination and exploration. Wasn’t that the need that propelled Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Einstein? The need to imagine new possibilities, the need to reach out beyond ourselves and understand the world around us. Not to help ourselves with physical survival or personal relationships or self-discovery but to know and comprehend this strange cosmos we find ourselves in. The need to ask the really big questions. How did it all begin? Far beyond our own lives, far beyond our community or our nation or our planet or even our solar system. How did the universe begin? It is a luxury to be able to ask such questions. It is also a human necessity.

I enjoy reflecting on the metaphysical; I find it as philosophically pleasurable as medieval monks would have found modern physics intolerable. I also find organized religion -- in large part assemblages of fixed doctrine, monuments to the stupidity of man, to paraphrase Gen. Patton -- little more than institutions barely evolved from ancient oracularism. Purely metaphysical ponderings, however, suit my grounding in philosophical skepticism: Is science the only remaining prophet of truth and reality? For all its thrilling explorations of the heavens' wonders, is the nonetheless slide-rule work of astrophysics and cosmology the singularly legitimate search for our farthest-most origins? Of The Ultimate? Of perhaps indiscernible, epistemologically impossible dimensions? I'd like to think -- in fact I like it so much, I believe it rather than merely thinking it -- that what we might call a theoretical agnosticism is nearly as intellectually valid in this science-worshiping world (excluding, of course, the ISIS caliphate and Donald Trump's United States) as theoretical physics. Open-minded agnosticism could never quite catch up to the intellectual respectability of science, since the former is wholly unverifiable, while the latter often finds a way. But in its cosmic meditations, does not free-thinking agnosticism -- contra the closed doctrine of atheism -- liberate us from modern conventionalities, some of which just might be as mistaken as antiquity's?

I see it's time for another round of my cough-suppressing and post-surgery-related narcotics, which hardcore atheists might also see as the induced "reasoning" behind this post of neither here- nor-there abstractions.

***

Updated: A just-discovered gem of relevance, arranged in a literary device known as an "antimetabole": 

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.

-- Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, d. 1988

 

 

Seriously, my Old Gray Lady?

Today,

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia announced that he would not retaliate against the United States’ decision to expel Russian diplomats and impose new sanctions — hours after his foreign minister recommended doing just that.

But only after, I'd bet, Putin's private, cunning and, shall we say, rather irresistible recommendation to his foreign minister that he do just that.

Russian foreign ministers aren't known for going rogue.

The New York Times characterizes "the switch" as "remarkable." I'd suggest the only remarkable development here is that the NYT could be so naive.

 

For the American right, a "grizzly steppe" indeed

In a delightful sign that even the most somber of bureaucratic mentalities can still be paronomastically playful, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security made public yesterday a 13-page report entitled "GRIZZLY STEPPE," which details the Russian Bear's assorted measures of "malicious cyber activity" in the U.S. presidential election -- that is, Vladimir's efforts, most pointedly, to elevate certain American friends to high places.

In broader terms, the report offers "technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence Services (RIS) to compromise and exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. Government, political, and private sector entities ... [including] government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information."

Not subtly ironic but flagrantly telling is that the greatest beneficiary of Putin's (let's call it what it essentially was) sphere-of-influence expansion is also America's leading voice of denial, dismissiveness, and self-defensive dunderheadeness. Premier-elect Donald Trump has brushed aside Russia's soft-power intervention into the American democratic process by blathering that "we ought to get on with our lives" rather than fretting about the Russian Bear's assault on the American system meant to safeguard those lives; he has belittled the U.S. intelligence community that is in universal agreement as to the attackers' proper identification; he has redirected blame for these cyberattacks at most any country but Russia, or maybe some anonymous, bed-sitting fat guy; and, in the most exemplary of Trumpian logic, he has suggested that at least one among those U.S. senators who are a trifle curious about Russia's elbowing of our electoral process, Lindsey Graham, is curious only because the South Carolinian ran against Trump in the Republican primaries -- and lost.

"Nobody knows what’s going on," Trump has averred in what professional psychologists would undoubtedly diagnosis as the granddadddy of all projections. In Trump's clinical case, however, he possesses good reason not to know -- or to claim not to know -- what's been going on, since being exposed as a foreign power's bitch is a rather awkward designation for a man who insists only he is capable of making America great again.

One of Trump's many incoming ministers of propaganda, Kellyanne Conway, has also chimed in with a flourish of projection, telling CNN, "I will tell you that even those who are sympathetic to President Obama on most issues are saying that part of the reason he [has issued fresh sanctions against Russia] was to quote 'box in' President-elect Trump. That would be very unfortunate if politics were the motivating factor here." The always politically motivated Ms. Conway vomits her self-aware gibberish with such an alluring, Goebbelsesque intensity that the weak-minded, authoritarianism-loving among us eagerly rush to regurgitate Conway & Co.'s awesome humbuggeries on social media and in cloistered forwarded emails. And so the many fallacies and epistemic closures of Trumpism are secured.

This is but one of the grizzly steppes that the American right -- after decades of priming by other pseudoconservative voices of unAmerican twaddle -- has furthered in its profoundly bizarre devotion to Trumpism's yearning authoritarianism. Even Orwell's 1948 American rightists would have at least feigned outrage at any domestic turn toward presidential autocracy, but no longer is counterfeit indignation an underlying "principle" of what we others still absurdly refer to as American conservatives. They now wear their tricolored armbands with pride, they celebrate the trashing of the American political tradition, they embrace Big Lie squalidness with an unashamed openness that sickens the conscience of out-of-power American decency.

Late yesterday afternoon I wrote that, for me, 2017 can't come soon enough. That, gentle reader, was an unpardonably undershot, self-absorbed observation. Looking around, what I should have written was that what can't come soon enough is 2021 -- the corrective, radiant aftermath, or so the ecumenically conscientious can hope, of Trumpian authoritarianism's and its epic farces' utter collapse.

 

Yep, it's pneumonia. Because of recently developed high fevers and an enduring satanic cough I finally capitulated and visited my local clinic this afternoon. The good news is that my diagnosed condition isn't severe enough (in that it's not affecting my cardiac functions) for hospitalization. I'm to remain in bed for at least 48 hours and stay newly doped to suppress my violent cough -- neither of which will interfere with my reduced, December writing schedule -- and of course take antibiotics.

That's the latest, and the last, I hope. I'm ready for 2017.        

 

Trump's promised upending of Obama's levelheaded foreign policy

President Obama's finest parting shot at alleged ally Bibi Netanyahu came yesterday in John Kerry's State Department speech, a tour de force of diplomatic courage undergirded by strategic prudence. The administration's open breaks with Israel's intransigence are indeed sui generis in the annals of American foreign policy, as Obama's critics have charged, only if one disregards similar breaks by, say, Presidents George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Still, as the NYT's David Sanger notes, Kerry spoke "with a clarity and harshness almost never heard from American diplomats when discussing one of their closest and strongest allies."

The American vote last week in the United Nations allowing the condemnation of Israel for settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, he added, was driven by a desire to save Israel from "the most extreme elements" in its own government. "The status quo is leading toward one state and perpetual occupation," Mr. Kerry said, his voice animated.

His speech was a powerful admonition after years of tension and frustration, with the Obama administration giving public voice to its long-held concern that Israel was headed off a cliff toward international isolation and was condemning itself to a future of low-level, perpetual warfare with the Palestinians.

That Obama's long-held, twofold concerns are conspicuously justified to the point of incontestability seem not to at all trouble his domestic, unconditional pro-Israel detractors (along, of course, with Netanyahu and his ultraright-wing compatriots), notwithstanding that the Middle East state's global pariahhood and perpetual violence are conditions not of the "future," but of the present. Israel's ever-expanding West Bank settlements are, as Kerry reaffirmed yesterday, not the only obstacle to a two-state resolution; they are, however, the most aggressive manifestation of Israel's unseriousness in achieving any such plausible resolution. Its illegal settlements are a contemptuous affront to diplomatic consensus and world opinion, especially that of its long-exasperated sponsor, the United States. The latter, in Netanyahu's view, is to suffer in silence while violating its own principles upholding international law, while the prime minister's foremost principle is to take the U.S.'s money and run.

And now, just as tragically for Israel, its superpower ally and the Middle East, comes President-elect Donald Trump, a crass foreign policy know-nothing whose degenerate simplicity of mind staggers those of conscience and a commitment to regional peace and security. His reaction to Kerry's monitory speech, expressed in Twitterdom's textbook unsophistication of a few characters, was "not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!"

Fast approaching is much more than that. Trump's inaugural reversal of America's principled opposition to Israel's notoriously illegal West Bank settlements will embody the true, sui generis upending of long-standing policy. Joining Israel's international pariahhood will be the United States -- officially -- and if Trump's tweeted imbecility is to be believed, Israel's most devoted foe, Iran, will be unilaterally liberated by the U.S. from its multilaterally achieved, no-nuclear weapons agreement. A more promising, American-Iranian military conflict is inconceivable.

Whole bevies of foreign policy analysts persist in their expressed belief that come January 20th, President Trump will somehow morph into a thoughtful, responsible statesman. This belief may well be the quintessence of naiveté, for President-elect Trump persists in giving every indication that his unschooled, ruinous simplicities of mind are going nowhere -- that they will, indeed, be the predominant feature of American foreign policy. God help us.

 

Trump's authoritarianism and ensuing chaos

Ross Douthat:

The possibilities for how Trump governs ... runs from ruthless authoritarianism at one end to utter chaos at the other. Under the authoritarian scenario, Trump would act on all his worst impulses with malign efficiency. The media would be intimidated, Congress would be gelded, the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. would go full J. Edgar Hoover against Trump’s enemies, the Trump family would enrich itself fantastically — and then, come a major terrorist attack, Trump would jail or intern anyone he deemed a domestic enemy....

The president-elect’s strong-arming of the private sector, his media-bashing tweets, and his feud with the intelligence community all hint at an authoritarian timeline ahead. Likewise, other fact patterns — that Congressional Republicans are mostly supine, that the stock market has surged — suggest that Trump could be authoritarian, corrupt and politically effective.

As I have pointed out before, history suggests that "ruthless authoritarianism" in no way debars "utter chaos." It is a common misconception that fascism's paradigm, the Nazi regime, was a marvel of bureaucratic efficiency. In reality its Führer, a narcissistic con artist of muddled intellect, surrounded himself with opportunistic gangsters and commonplace cutthroats whose professional vitas were, shall we say, rather devoid of artful governing skills. These were the Peter-unprincipled malevolences (with some experienced exceptions, such as Albert Speer) who guided the Nazi machine in its everyday affairs, which, it shouldn't surprise, often resulted in chaotic governance. What prevailed were self-seeking struggles for the Führer's favor, rather than inner-circle attention to the fundamentals of competent governance.

Nonetheless, although authoritarian and corrupt -- Hermann Göring being the inhuman paradigm within corruption's paradigm -- the Nazi regime was, perforce, politically effective. It was rather easy to achieve Reichstag cooperation when piano wire was the only alternative. The regime also engaged, of course, in the "strong-arming of the private sector," which on occasion strove -- tried, anyway -- to serve as Hitler's more judicious intelligence community. In late 1941, for instance, Germany's leading industrialists sat the Führer down and cautioned him that his war apparatus couldn't endure a long global conflict; the Fatherland and its occupied territories, they explained, simply lacked the material resources to do so -- ultimately, they would be overwhelmed by the allies' superior means. Der Führer, however, being such an intellectually muddled, superbly narcissistic con artist that his con artistry extended to self-deception, brushed off the industrialists' warnings, and assured them that things would work out because of his brilliant negotiating abilities. That, and Nietzschean will, you know. One can imagine that America's private sector, warning the intellectually deficient and seemingly Nietzschean President Trump against the colossal imprudence of nation-damaging trade wars, might be similarly brushed off.

With chaos to follow -- which, as noted, is characteristic of history's authoritarian regimes.

 

A personal note

Another quick update on my post-surgical condition, since it is still affecting my work, which many of you financially support.

Recovery has been slower than I anticipated. I thought by now I'd be back up to speed, or at least 80-90% there. This has not been the case. Although my belly is largely healed, I can't say the same for my lungs, which were already damaged because of many really brilliant years of cigarette smoking. For a week after returning home I fought a nasty cough (likely picked up at the hospital), finally had it checked out, and it was ruled, sure enough, a viral infection. It then went away, but now it's back, worse than before. In the past couple days I have spent more time dry-hacking and convulsing than I've spent saying Hail Marys in penance for the recent sins of the nation -- and I'm not Catholic. (I suppose you could say that mine is sort of a political Pascalian wager: It can't hurt.) At any rate my fear, as anyone's would be, is that I've contracted pneumonia; I just took an online test for it and scored 7 out of 10. (Amusingly, I was exempted from the symptom of "diarrhea," but only because my recent hospitalization was for the purpose of removing my colon -- that's one dandy way to forever avoid the runs -- which, indirectly, has led to respiratory complications.) But so far no high fever, which, if it comes, will send me back to the clinic. Barring that, medical advice is to rest. Lord knows I'm doing plenty of that, since a profound fatigue allows little else. From what I have gathered in my layman's research, if pneumonia I do have, it should, with proper home care, pass within a week. Should I vanish from these here Internets by next Tuesday, you'll know it didn't. OK that was a joke. On the less dark-humored side, I just realized I haven't writhed in another freakishly convulsing episode for a good 15 minutes, so perhaps I'm already on the mend.

My apologies. This "quick update" has grown, perhaps, inexcusably lengthy; on the other hand you, my financial supporters, deserve from me that which we'll never see from -- oh sweet Jesus, this is still so painful to write -- President Trump: transparency.

 

The tyranny of voter irrationality

But what America needed was change:

The unemployment rate [is] down to 4.6 percent...; a broader measure of underemployment called the U-6 -- [which] 'includes workers who are part-time but want full-time work, and people who’ve given up looking for work but still want it' -- [is] not quite at its pre-recession level, but it has also fallen dramatically...; adjusted for inflation, median weekly earnings for wage and salary workers were at an all-time high in the third quarter...; gas prices remain low, as does overall inflation...; stocks have reached all-time highs...; [and] gross domestic product growth for the third quarter was revised upward last week, to 3.5 percent.

Scrupulous economists have long since jettisoned the once-tidy classical view that consumers are rational actors. The disciplines of "psychology, biology, and neurology are ganging up on economics to prove that, when it comes to making decisions, people are anything but rational," wrote, in 2013, the Atlantic's Derek Thompson, in "The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices" -- or, rather, was wrong. Today, the only economists still enslaved by the academic concept of consumer rationality are Hayekian mossbacks compelled by their ideology of a free-market system operating much like Newton's conception of God's perfectly ordered, universal clockwork.

In his most telling passage, Thompson observed that "Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching." Perhaps that advertised, sleek, sporty new car that promises to have libidinous members of the opposite sex flocking to your driveway is not, in your middle-aged flabbiness, really your best choice of fresh wheels; nonetheless, Madison Avenue's provocative lures may well be uppermost in the files of your recently accessing mind.

The economic irrationality of the American consumer applies, of course, to politics, too. How did so many 2016 voters manage to overlook, and demand "change" from, the underlying realities of Obama's vastly bettered economy -- its low unemployment, its higher wage earnings, its rather aggressive GDP growth? Their minds' most readily accessible file was that containing the ubiquitous humbug -- hustled by dreary Republicans' relentless propaganda machine -- of an economy verging on the apocalyptically dystopic.

Even the most cursory search of the "deep body of information" behind the countervailing truth might have persuaded all but the most partisan, anti-Obama/Clinton voters that Republican and Trumpian doomsaying was a risible mythology grounded in vintage disinformation. And yet these "independent" voters couldn't be bothered with even the searchingly cursory; they simply lapped up the regnant bugaboos of Republican flimflammery -- reinforced by office watercooler prattle that "everybody knows" the economy is sluggish and in need of redirected guidance. In that, the second phenomenon, these voters reaffirmed Alexis de Tocqueville's antebellum observation that Americans' greatest political peril was perhaps that of a herd mentality, the democratic proclivity to abandon critical thought and passively go with whatever the mob's often-boneheaded consensus happens to be.

In 2016, thanks in accompanying part to the antiquated Electoral College, it wasn't so much Donald Trump but voter irrationality that triumphed. This might be somewhat more bearable had the majority of voters chosen to so egregiously gut American political decency. A peculiar comfort might have derived from democratic majoritarianism's choice of bottomless national disgrace -- a very small comfort, true, but at least we'd know that the founders' elitist warnings of demagoguery's rancid seduction were validated; that a lazy, ill-informed body politic had freely reduced democracy to its most ignoble, fiercely cautioned-against unfolding. As it is, however, the rational voter's America has been hijacked by the immensely irrational, which accounts for sane America's unprecedented despair. It didn't ask for this.

 

Call them what they are

The New York Times:

There is acknowledgment on both sides of the lectern that some re-examination of the [White House daily briefing] system is warranted.

In a journalistically revolutionary act of straightforwardness, the NYT, toward the end of the presidential campaign, chose to omit the more traditional, coy references to Trump's many "misrepresentations" and to insert instead the plain reporting that he lies. The most fundamentally conceivable reexamination of the WH briefing system is that the press corps at large follows suit -- and calls, to his face, Press Secretary Sean Spicer's many misrepresentations what they are: Trumpian lies and intolerable bullshit.

 

Warring on Trump's coming trade wars

From the less than rhetorically splashy and indeed wonkishly dry Congressional Research Service comes an unsettling passage of swashbuckling portent:

The United States Constitution gives Congress the power to impose and collect taxes, tariffs, duties, and the like, and to regulate international commerce. While the Constitution gives the President authority to negotiate international agreements, it assigns him no specific power over international commerce and trade. Through legislation, however, Congress may delegate some of its power to the President, such as the power to modify tariffs under certain circumstances.

Which, more than a dozen times over the last 100 years, is precisely what Congress has done. (Notwithstanding outraged Republican cries of Obamian usurpation, the ceding of congressional to executive authority has been a long, bipartisan operation.) Paul Krugman summarizes the above's, unilateral potential under existing legislation:

[President Trump] can restrict imports if such imports "threaten to impair the national security"; he can impose tariffs "to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits"; he can modify tariff rates when foreign governments engage in "unjustifiable" policies.

Again, and as Krugman emphasizes, it will be the "executive himself ... who determines whether such conditions apply" -- not the incoming Republican Congress (which, under the almighty Republican Trump, is at any rate likely to proceed as rubber-stamping Banana Republicans), and not the federal courts, which, as the CRS empirically observes, "will probably not review the reasoning behind a President’s determination that executive action is warranted." Such actions are usually deemed by the courts to lie within the jurisdiction of politics, not the judiciary.

Thus Trump already possesses the legal means to unilaterally launch trade wars; he alone, under the guidance of his ghastly benightedness, may decide what constitutes imported threats to national security; what, in terms of tariffs, is "unjustifiable" by others; and whatever trade-deficit-reducing tariffs he chooses to impose. For a demagogic globalus ignoramus who deliberately remains out of touch with, say, what China is doing with its currency, the prospect of such presidential autonomy is harrowing indeed.

From means we move to motive. "There’s an obvious incentive for Mr. Trump to make a big show," writes Krugman, "of doing something to fulfill campaign promises" -- especially those centered in his turgid, simplistic rhetoric on the evils of existing trade agreements. "And if this creates international conflict, that’s actually a plus when it comes to diverting attention from collapsing health care and so on" -- from, that is, Trump's "radically antiworker domestic agenda."

It is here that Krugman's NYT op-ed just as harrowingly intersects with that of another this morning, Sergei Guriev's "In Russia, It's Not the Economy, Stupid." Writes the European Bank's chief economist:

Thanks largely to the government’s extensive control over information, Mr. Putin has rewritten the social contract in Russia. Long based on economic performance, it is now about geopolitical status. If economic pain is the price Russians have to pay so that Russia can stand up to the West, so be it.

For megalomaniacal reasons that lie altogether outside the American political tradition, Mr. Trump unblushingly sees Mr. Putin as his leadership model, along with Mussolini and other dictatorial goons. Hence little imagination is required to predict that President Trump will emulate President Putin's populist project of diverting the public's attention from self-imposed "economic pain" (via trade wars) by braying about the higher cause of America's reemergent "geopolitical status" -- of the U.S. as the greatly remade puppeteer of the world's subordinate players.

All that Trump would lack in his attention-diverting trade wars is Putin's "extensive control over information." In recalling, however, the American media's "patriotic" lap-doggedness in George W. Bush's ramp-up to the Iraq war, one wonders if Trump's constitutional absence of government information control is a presidential distinction with little difference from Putin's.

Yesterday I expressed hope -- confidence, in fact -- that enlightened voices of protest will persuasively expose and ultimately take down the Trump administration. There is, of course, no voice more essential in this most honorable of pursuits than that of the Fourth Estate. It seems rather flaccid to say that I also trust it will, by and large, live up to its First Amendment obligations of scrutiny, but I'm afraid that's all I've got: trust that it will, and hope that I'm not wrong.

 

Merry Christmas -- really!

It occurs that in this 2,016th year of our Lord, little else says "Christmas" like the 2001 "Oh Christ!" prescience of culture critic Gary Kamiya. In reflecting on millions of Americans' seasonal film favorite, It's a Wonderful Life, Kamiya took an unsentimental, satirical look at George W. Bush's Grinchy America and saw -- President-elect Donald Trump's, with assists by the equally hideous likes of Paul Ryan & Co.

"Pottersville" [reeks] of Donald Trump-like vulgarity -- but is that such a bad thing? Being named after a ruthless captain of industry casts a long, Ayn Randian shadow over a city, giving tacit permission to its inhabitants to pursue their pleasures in the enveloping moral darkness.... [In] the real world, Potter won.

We all live in Pottersville now. Bedford Falls is gone. The plucky little Savings and Loan closed down years ago, just like in George’s nightmare. Cleaned up, his evil eyebrows removed, armed with a good PR firm, Mr. Potter goes merrily about his business, "consolidating" the George Baileys of the world. To cling to dreams of a bucolic America where the little guy defeats the forces of Big Business ... is just to ask for heartbreak and confusion....

So don’t fight it. It’s a Pottersville world!

Which is to say, in contemporary terms, that Donald Trump is essentially picking up where George Bush left off. Re-ensconced in the republic's highest office is the swaggering, beclouded spirit of philistinism -- a gaudy anti-intellectualism and hermetically impervious ignorance parading themselves as a reinvigorated zeitgeist of an America greatly remade. Precisely how Trump's illiterate "vision" will materialize over the next four years is a frightful uncertainty to ponder, but the proleptic splendor of Humean empiricism suggests 48 streaming months of stupendous con artistry, naked mendacity, unprecedented unaccountability and a caving house of cards -- including more than a few extra jokers -- resembling every other authoritarian populism of history's ultimate horrors.

Incautious flimflammer that he is, implicit in Trump's "picking up where George Bush left off" is the spectre of an exponentially shameless presidency scamming its base but fooling no others. That we others who have never been entranced or tempted by Trumpism encompass a three-fifths majority of the body politic only aggravates the sickening awareness that the enemy is within. Perhaps worse than that was the majority's rather indifferent refusal to heave the sundry depravities of Trumpism in November's dumpster -- a squalid stain on the national character whose indelibility is incontestable.

And yet therein lies my hope for America, cynical optimist that I am. Many of us believed we had hit rock bottom in the bumbling, godawful Bush years, thus we further had no where else to go but up. Momentarily we did -- quite some way, in fact -- but the scurrilous triumph of far-grimmer Trumpism has served as what I trust will be a useful corrective to what rock bottom really looks like. Four years of the rolling national disgrace that is Donald Trump (with aforementioned assists by his hideous congressional allies), relentlessly assailed and exposed by enlightened voices of protest, just might, after all, reinvigorate an authentically virtuous zeitgeist of American nobility, honor, and true greatness.

With that in mind I can genuinely say to you, Merry Christmas. For symbolically, today is a day of hope and rebirth. May its symbolism prove to be something more, much more.

 

Others' faith, and my agnosticism

On this Christmas Eve, "Where is God?" asks WaPo columnist Michael Gerson, whom Time magazine, a decade ago, cast among "the 25 most influential evangelicals in America." His answer compels me to wonder, Would his fellow evangelicals now cast him as a bit soft -- as slipping in influential stature? For in what seems an almost heretical distancing from leap-of-faith evangelicalism, Gerson remarks: "We cannot assume, of course, that [Christ's divinity] is real or true. But for countless millions who have accepted it, this story has divided B.C. and A.D. in their own lives. It has provided courage and comfort in the midst of the ordinary, the unjust and the unthinkable."

Gerson's negation of his prefatory verb, "assume," would seem (or so it seems to me) to fracture Christianity's or Christian evangelicalism's most fundamental foundation: that of faith, which, however elaborately defined throughout centuries of theological exposition, can be reduced to a willing assumption. Knowledge (in the scientific or epistemologically philosophical sense) of Christ's divinity is unavailing, hence to it, the believer must leap (or, through a Paulinelike epiphany, is led to leap). Religious faith in the utterly unknowable, then, stands at the zenith of all earthly assumptions. Nonetheless, Gerson posits that we cannot assume as "real or true" Christ's divinity. Against the inherent arbitrariness of Christian evangelical (or any other religious) doctrine, Gerson's dictum seems a radical promiscuity, if not an apostasy, bless his unorthodox heart.

Even more intriguing is how Gerson confronts his question, "Where is God?" For he does so in the wholesale absence of exegetic theology, engaging instead what German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, more than three centuries ago, labeled "theodicy," which itself confronts what is perhaps the most penetrating, inextinguishable and indeed burdensome question in all of theism: How can a good and caring God permit so much evil in this world?

Many of us, having seen the shining words at one point or another in our lives -- knowing in our bones that we once knew, beyond all the doubts of philosophy, that GOD IS -- ... see only futility and cruelty in the countless lives shortened by disease or disaster, or afflicted by poverty or conflict.... Where is God in the oppression of whole peoples by cruel and corrupt dictators who care nothing for the lives of the innocent? Or among more than 60 million refugees torn from their homes and forced to live as resented strangers?

Broadly, the theodicist answers that God has given us free will, so the world's evil is our own, not His or Hers or Its; or that overcoming evil is humanity's most consecrated mission; or -- within the metaphysically unfathomable, this is the logical response -- Who the hell knows? Underlying each, of course, is the beginning point of faith: the unflinching belief that there is, in fact, a God.

I possess no Hitchensesque hostility toward those who harbor such a belief -- I find philosophical abstractions of Prime Movement and supernatural cosmic dimensions among the most intellectually pleasurable to contemplate -- but I have never quite gotten there. Amid the reasons why are photos of five-year-old Syrian boys bloodied by ungodly madness, stacks of Holocaust corpses, Civil War battlefields' aftermaths, the unspeakable barbarities of slavery; in general, world history's recorded assemblage of incomprehensible human suffering -- which I, merely through privileged accident of heritage and existential happenstance, have dodged. Millions of my brothers and sisters on this earth have not been so fortunate, and their ghastly ill fates are as theistically inexplicable as my exemption from them. In my self-contented world isolated from so much chaos, cruelty and bloodshed, I find leaping to a prodigious faith in a caring God almost insulting to those in past and present want of mercy.

And so I dwell in agnosticism -- a philosophical compromise with the infinitely unknowable.

 

Glowing imbecility

Stupefyingly moronic, even for America's most bombastic moron:

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said: "Let it be an arms race," when asked for clarification of his Thursday Twitter post calling for an expansion of U.S. nuclear weapon capabilities, MSNBC said on Friday.

"Trump's tweet came the day after meeting with a dozen Pentagon officials" -- including, presumably, the deranged, Stone-Aged ghost of Gen. Curtis LeMay -- "involved with defense acquisition programs."

Added Trump-whisperer Sean Spicer, "We will all be just fine."

Such stupefying moronity defies comment. There really are no words.

 

The white betrayal of American liberalism -- and hope

A peculiar feature of New Dealism and postwar liberalism's success is that it has turned on the sponsoring political party, and the further, unfolding paradox within is that the prime beneficiaries of FDR's bedrock progressivism -- the white working class -- have morphed into today's illiberal voters. While both phenomena have conformed to the seemingly inescapable, intangible law of unintended consequences, American racism and selfish resentments are, perhaps, their more concrete explanation.

As, for instance, historian Lizabeth Cohen broadly illustrates in her brilliant, 1990 microcosmic work, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, the Great Depression's ravages were those which transfigured the American Everyman from a supporter of small government to seeker of central-government relief. Coolidge-Hooverism's wholesale economic collapse soon exhausted the electorate's once-preferred, traditional sources of aid: local churches, state and municipal funds, community chests, benevolent fraternal societies and the like. The depression's relentlessness, its bankruptcy of conventional charities and ensuing national despair compelled a change in the electorate's political consciousness, inspiring it to look to Washington for assistance. Hence Middle America's almost overnight longing for a new direction: the federal government as humanitarian benefactor. It can be reasonably argued that FDR was less the supplier of alternative aid than a meeter of mass demand.

Although the Great Depression afflicted Americans of every color, Roosevelt's New Deal program -- made legislatively possible only by placating the ethnic prejudices of Southern congressional Democrats -- was essentially a program of white relief. And relief they got, from government jobs to assorted transfer payments, which, however conservatively circumscribed they actually were, were indeed revolutionary against America's political tradition of self-help. Ideological conservatives freaked out, of course, proclaiming the end of Americans' self-reliance and condemning the New Deal's culture of "dependency"; the electorate, however, by and large rather liked the fresh nets of various social securities, made necessary only by modernity's often brutal, impersonal forces. In the postwar era FDR's liberalism expanded, among many other wholesome programs, to Truman's GI Bill and Johnson's Medicare. In sheer numbers, white working-class Americans benefited more than any others.

They still do. And yet this societal stratum now takes for granted the magnificently successful understructures of 20th-century American liberalism. It has turned on the very party that laid the foundations of a more civilized society and vastly bettered their lives -- the party the white working class has come to see as the anti-Everyman patron of the lazy, the shiftless, the undeserving, the mere takers. Blue-colored white resentments prevail over the more useful perspective of class-based political solidarity; thus America's divisiveness, manifested in Trumpism's ugliness, is more antagonistically cultural than socioeconomically grounded. That working-class whites continue to profit from FDR's material virtues and his Democratic successors' amplifications of them seems not to occur to this resentment-obsessed class.

As the Post's Catherine Rampell like-mindedly observes this morning, today's "Democratic policies" -- far more than Republicans', and I wouldn't say probably -- "probably would help the white working class. But the white working class doesn’t seem to buy that they’re the ones who’d really benefit. Across rural America, the Rust Belt, Coal Country and other hotbeds of Trumpism, voters have repeatedly expressed frustration that the lazy and less deserving are getting a bigger chunk of government cheese.... [A] recent YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that Trump voters are five times more likely to believe that 'average Americans' have gotten less than they deserve in recent years than to believe that 'blacks' have gotten less than they deserve." And so there you have it: white, Trumpian illiberalism as the product of racist resentments -- and an unmindful betrayal of the party that historically lifted the white condition.

When one contemplates that white racism has unexceptionally dogged four centuries of American existence, one is rather reluctant to anticipate any primal screams of sudden reformation. Indeed, one is more justified in the easy presupposition that white-American racism will likely endure as a multigenerational cultural plague. And yet, therein would lie true despair -- the hopeless writing off of unbigoted advancement. Thus the best that unappreciated American liberalism can do is to remind the resentful, with newfound resolution, of its many virtuous accomplishments -- as well as those ready for the taking.